


Cosmic

by LittleRedCosette



Series: Cosmic & Earthly, Infinite & Transient [4]
Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Angst, Backstory, Betrayal, Captivity, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, F/M, Falling In Love, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Limbo, M/M, Mid-Canon, Military Background, Non-Linear Narrative, Possible Character Death, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, Secrets, Slow Burn, Torture, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-24
Updated: 2019-03-09
Packaged: 2019-09-26 06:59:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 24,999
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17137160
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleRedCosette/pseuds/LittleRedCosette
Summary: The first thing Eames ever says to Arthur is:When you eat an apple in the dream-share, what does it taste like?They’re both in military green, both impatient and clever and quick. Both carrying scars inside their skulls, though they can’t see them yet.Arthur is seventeen years old.





	1. PART ONE

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> His name.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lovely reader friends,
> 
> **This chapter has been rewritten!!**
> 
> It is (I hope) better now. Be sure to read it, or the next one probably isn't going to make sense.
> 
> Love and kisses,  
> LRCx

.

.

Eventually, it won’t matter anymore.

Eventually, it won’t matter.

(Not yet though.)

.

.

**(after the storm)**

.

.

He’s awake, dreaming, dazing.

His stomach hurts, teeth in his intestines and his every thought wrapped up with barbed wire inside his head.

He’s awake. Tastes it in the air, hydrogen cloud of secrets.

There are two men talking.

One hovers too far, watches so acutely and he is afraid of those eyes. Lab Rat eyes, shifty. Lab Rat, blond and tall and angry.

And the other hovers so close. Hands that are warm and shaky, mucky face from the blood leaking down in streaks. Soft Voice that murmurs, bruising tender.

Lab Rat doesn’t like Soft Voice.

Soft Voice doesn’t seem to notice.

He’s awake, dreaming, not-dreaming.

They are in a big space, dark, slits of light like prison bars. He thinks, maybe, he remembers prison bars from Before.

They call him different names, and maybe they’re all right or maybe they’re all wrong, but none of them fit. They all sound the same in his ringing, thudding ears.

 _Please,_ he tries to say but it doesn’t come out properly. He’s not entirely sure what he’s asking for.

All he knows is that Lab Rat has a gun and Soft Voice has tattoos. They are quick-tempered, and they are looking at him and they are both terribly afraid.

He thinks Lab Rat wants to kill him.

He thinks Soft Voice will probably keep him safe, for now.

.

.

He doesn’t remember waking up. He doesn’t remember going to sleep. Every breath lined with words his mouth won’t make.

He sits on the floor, next to the red splatter Soft Voice left when he fell to his knees, choking on air and whining. He sees Lab Rat outside, pulling things from the trunk of the car. Bags, cables, plastic. A huge, heavy spade.

He looks over at Soft Voice, whose eyes are closed, his face smeared with sweat and blood.

Lab Rat is smiling and Soft Voice is dying and he doesn’t know what to do. All he knows is that Lab Rat has a mean stare and Soft Voice has a kind one.

He opens his mouth and says something that might be meaningless. It’s a crack of sound like dry, dry ground and Soft Voice opens his eyes, slits of water, pink and grey.

Hums and blinks and he finally sees Lab Rat, sees him move too fast and he staggers and Soft Voice cries out.

He’s awake and he’s paralysed; there are two men fighting and they are fighting badly, fighting nasty.

Soft Voice on his knees with his head bowed like his neck might snap. Hair golden sand and dirty blood and sea eagle eyes.

Lab Rat snarling, Lab _Hound_ maybe.

Soft Voice looks at him so desperately, yearning, and he says something. A name, that name again, the same one as before.

“Arthur,” Soft Voice says, and he thinks, _yes,_ that’s alright, he’ll take that name.

He can be Arthur, if that’s what Soft Voice needs.

Lab Rat isn’t looking. Lab Rat doesn’t care.

Lab Rat might kill Soft Voice, might strike him down, and then he really will be alone.

Soft Voice, he’s got a loud, loud scream.

.

.

He’s awake. He moves quietly, moves stealthily. Picks up the spade in both hands and swings.

.

.

He’s awake. He’s dreaming, dazing. He’s alone, like he was, like he always has been.

A hundred thousand years, lonely as a star.

.

.

Lab Rat is dead.

So is Soft Voice.

.

.

Arthur keeps hold of the gun, keeps his eyes on Soft Voice, bruised, bloody; that soft, soft voice that promised him he’d be safe, that someone would come to get him.

.

.

Arthur remembers him, his soft voice in the pillow dark, caressing him like a dream.

He thinks his name was Alex.

.

.

**(we found you)**

.

.

It begins when he’s eight, or six, or five.

He tries talking to the other boys and girls, but they laugh, sometimes, and other times they don’t seem to hear him. It’s like he’s invisible, like he’s a superhero only, not super, not a hero.

He doesn’t like the other boys and girls. Doesn’t like how they laugh, how they stare.

“You need to make an effort, Jeremy,” the teachers all say, looking impatient, the way Dad looks at Mom sometimes, and the way Mom looks at Grandma.

All of them except for Miss Ryan, of course. Miss Ryan, who gives him ginger snaps and lets him do homework in the classroom at lunchtime.

Only, then her belly gets too big. The baby inside her needs her more than Jeremy does, so she goes away.

Jeremy understands.

He is important, but he is not Important. He is not A Priority.

The temp who replaces Miss Ryan is loud, his temper as bristled as his moustache. But at least he seems to hate everyone else as much as he hates Jeremy.

Jeremy is ok with that.

He’s invisible, after all.

.

.

His name is Jeremy, which, he points out to his mother one day, is just a layman’s Jeremiah.

She asks if he wants to be called Jeremiah instead; scrunches her nose as she says it, which Jeremy has learned means she’s teasing him.

“No,” he replies, feeling flushed and sullen.

His mom frowns, turning away to stir the pasta again, and Jeremy thinks he’s hurt her feelings, which is ridiculous because he’d just answered her question.

His name is Jeremy, which is lazy talk for Jeremiah, which means _Exalted by God._

Jeremy hasn’t ever been exalted by anyone, least of all God.

Names don’t have meanings, though; they are a random assortment of letters that someone one day decided were worth more than other random assortments of different letters.

There’s a boy in his class called Frederick, which means _Keeping the Peace._ Frederick is a bully who got suspended for pushing Daisy Wilcox into some nettles and kicking Mr Langdon in the shin.

Jeremy is named for his grandfather. And why on earth would his dad want to call his son by his father’s name, anyway?

The first name he’s ever given is Jeremy.

.

.

Later, he will be called Arthur, which means _Courageous._

He won’t agree with that one, either.

.

.

Jeremy isn’t surprised when his parents don’t immediately reject the man that comes to the door with a badge in his pocket, a folder of IQ tests and a suggestion their son might be better off Elsewhere _._

Jeremy listens to them from his perch on the stairs.

His mother is a little teary, his father is defensive; the strange man is a snake.

Jeremy sits on the stairs and listens to his school reports getting read out loud like a sentencing. As if being bad at group work is now some precursor to psychopathy.

He’s never harmed an animal in his life, doesn’t even kill the spiders that creep into his bed on the slope to winter.

He’s sixteen years old. There are two people in the world whose company he doesn’t abhor, and three more that are almost tolerable.

He’s not entirely sure where the problem lies.

The snake holds out the apple. This time, Adam takes it first, Eve following with a defeated, anxious whimper of disappointment, like it’s some reflection of her abilities as a mother to take the bite.

“Jeremy?” she calls out, so softly, as if she knows he can hear her. “Please come here.”

He doesn’t normally answer her first time; likes to test how important it really is, whether she’ll give up or get annoyed.  Not this time.

He nudges the door and looks at his mother, her wobbly mouth. His father’s arm around her, united front, a facade.

Jeremy knows, then. This is A Priority. This is Important.

.

.

Jeremy takes the tests and the snake grins at him, hungry cobra unhooking his jaw.

Jeremy doesn’t like him, doesn’t trust him. Tells his mom as much only, of course, Jeremy’s never liked anyone, never trusted a soul, so why should she listen to him now?

She kisses his forehead and her lips are chapped and the last thing she ever says to him is, _Please be good._

He hadn’t realised he’d ever been bad.

.

.

 _Why am I Arthur?_ he asked, and there was no crevice in which to conceal the secrecy of his swollen pride. It read true on his face, like embarrassment and pleasure, a flush of surprise.

 _It’s an English legend,_ the man replied, like a novelty, like a charm.

.

.

**(first, at the shore)**

.

.

Arthur’s got a parasite inside him. Resilient, perhaps it is a virus.

It’s going to get him killed, just like they always told him it would.

Parasitic kindness nestled deep in his psyche. He’s not sure where it came from. It’s not a genetic flaw, nor did he ever really learn it.

Actually, that’s not true. He _did_ learn it, unwillingly, by proxy.

Kindness did not come naturally to him, in the beginning. Now it will be his end.

He holsters his gun with a resigned sigh and looks down at the man on the ground, blood on his shirt, a swollen wrist. He’s got big green eyes that clench something grief-stricken in Arthur’s chest.

He should kill him, Arthur knows it.

Cesar Mortimer knows it too, from where he lays sprawled on the ground. Looking up at Arthur, bug-eyed and sweating bullets. Those big green eyes, tearful.

“Go,” Arthur says, because Mortimer’s little more than a kid, frightened little billy goat. Mortimer scrambles away in a flurry of limbs and Arthur wipes his brow, feels the pull of a deep bruised muscle in his shoulder.

.

.

He doesn’t regret it immediately, even though he knows he should.

.

.

He doesn’t regret it until he’s crouched in a desolate block of abandoned flats, until he’s out of bullets and he can hear man-shaped lions prowling downstairs.

Arthur pulls out his cell phone, ashy dirt under his splintered fingernails, and he should break it, he knows he should. It would be better this way. Better if he simply disappeared, a speck on the event horizon, fading into others’ memories and under the dirt of the earth.

Instead, he calls Eames.

.

.

The first thing Eames ever says to Arthur is: _When you eat an apple in the dream-share, what does it taste like?_

They’re both in military green, both impatient and clever and quick. Both carrying scars inside their skulls, though they can’t see them yet.

Arthur is seventeen years old.

(Seventeen years, three months and three days, excluding the seven hundred and ninety-two thousand, four hundred and eighty-nine minutes of dream time he’s lived so far.)

.

.

So, when the horsemen are knocking and he is eleven flights of stairs up shit creek with only broken paddles to spare, Arthur calls Eames. Types the number like his own name, every single one he’s ever had.

Eames answers with his usual lack of greeting.

_“Make it quick, I was about t –”_

A fist of iron terror seizes Arthur’s throat, then. He can’t _breathe_ for how much it hurts to hear his voice.

“Read your tea leaves recently?” he asks, and Eames cuts off with a splash of sound, breath drawn in like a screwdriver through a wall. Then, reservedly,

_“Am I going on a long journey?”_

“Hoping you could tell me,” Arthur says, tries to sound teasing but it falls flat. There’s the rattle-crack of a door five floors down being bashed in. He clutches the phone, lifeline grip, his anchor across oceans to a kind, soft voice. “I think I am.”

 _“Shit,”_ Eames mutters. _“Where are you?”_

Arthur wants to laugh at that, cough up the broken plaster in his lungs and buckle down into the earth like a dying animal laid to rest. Blood’s congealing at his hairline and it’ll be a miracle if all his toes are intact inside his shoes.

“Too late,” he says, as another door caves in, closer this time. A bird screeches and Arthur presses his forehead to his knees, panting. “They’re already here.”

 _“How did they find you?”_ Eames asks flatly, and Arthur, God he _wishes_ he could be mad at Eames for assuming Arthur did something wrong, but he’s right. Of course he’s right. Eames knows Arthur, knows him best when he’s doing everything wrong.

So Arthur, tasting the bitterness on his tongue, hearing it in his thumping heart as he pictures that frightened, billy goat face, says,

“Mortimer.”

 _“Fuck,”_ Eames snarls. _“I told you. I fecking told you, if you got yourself tied down by your mistakes, I would let you burn.”_

 _I know,_ Arthur wants to reply. _I’m sorry, I know, I promised and I failed._

There are still moments when Arthur believes it, when he honestly believes Eames will walk away from him if need arises.

Only Eames, he’s a man of actions. It rarely matters what he says, because he lies so fluently, a native language of his own. It’s what he _does_ that matters more.

And the truth is, he’s always come for Arthur, whether he asked for it or not. So Arthur bites down on his thumb as he shifts his weight and then he says,

“You’re a liar.”

Eames is panicking. Arthur can hear it in his voice as he whispers again, _“I told you,”_ because Eames, he likes to be in control of these things. He doesn’t like flying blind even if he’s good at it. He doesn’t like Arthur flying blind.

“I know you did,” Arthur says, mostly to placate him as his breaths come harshly down the phone.

Below him, the crack of a door crippling under the weight of boots.

“They’re downstairs,” he says.

Eames sighs, and Arthur feels it on his brow, like a hummingbird wingbeat the second before a kiss to his forehead.

 _“Arthur,”_ Eames says like it will magic him to his side.

They planned for this. They made _plans._ Arthur’s stopped thinking about it, though, slowly, over the years. He’s felt safe, until yesterday, when he didn’t call Eames, when he should have called Eames.

Now it’s too late. Like lying under the hotel sheets, and Eames’ voice whispering shadows in the dark, _Do you love me now?_

“I’m scared,” Arthur says and Eames makes a sound like a bullet in a thigh, a punctured gasp of harm.

 _“I’ll come get you,”_ he says and Arthur knows that he means it. That he would, that he _will._ Eames will kill himself to get to him if he has to, and Arthur hates him for it, because that’s what Eames is good at. Eames is good at killing himself. He’s been doing it for years.

It was living he couldn’t get right, no matter how hard Arthur tried to make him.

Another door cracks. He can hear footsteps, hear rapid voices and hear Eames’ breath in his ear, Eames’ voice promising and griping and the sound of regret in a voice not designed for apologies.

“Send the architect,” Arthur says, which was never The Plan, but to hell if he can avoid Cobb ever having to leave his kids again, he’ll do it.

 _“She won’t have a fucking clue,”_ Eames grunts, and even now it makes Arthur smile, that snobbish distaste Eames has, his utter contempt.

“She’s good,” Arthur reminds him and all Eames can reply with is,

_“Your faith in others will be my end.”_

The voices, closer now. They know he’s there. They’re playing games.

Arthur swallows down a gulp of sound, his eyes clenched even tighter shut than his mouth. It’s not the first time Eames has said that, and he can’t help wonder if it’s true. His faith has killed a lot of people over the years. Stands to reason it’ll kill Eames, too.

Eames must hear something of it in his silence, because he adds, quieter, encouraging, like a Captain to his Lieutenant,

_“You know what to do.”_

Yes, because they planned this. They always knew and Arthur thinks he shouldn’t be surprised he’s the one to fuck up first, because he’s too meticulous, too practiced. Too kind.

Eames is so far away, probably still in Italy with that photographer he likes so much. Arthur feels alone and small, feels _afraid_ because maybe Eames is going to come for him but then, maybe he’s not.

Maybe Arthur got too comfortable with the lies and Eames is going to let him rot away for the rest of his miserable days. He’ll keep fucking that twenty-year-old photographer and forging passports out of boredom and building dreams the way others count sheep while Arthur, he just doesn’t, doesn’t do anything because he’s worse off than dead, so much worse off by far.

“I’m so fucking sorry, Alex,” Arthur pleads, like if only he can prove it, then maybe Eames won’t leave him to die alone, even if perhaps he deserves it for being so stupid.

 _“I’m not, not even a little bit,”_ Eames says, which is either the most romantic thing he’s ever said, or the shittiest. _“Stay on the line.”_

Arthur shakily thumbs his eyes and tears leak through his lashes like blood through his hair. He’s trembling and he’s aching already and they haven’t even found him yet.

A foot collides with the door across the room.

“I’m out of ammo,” he whispers.

Another thud, and the wood of the hinges crack. He hears his mistakes like bells and he staggers up a little against the wall, dizzy with it, breathless.

This is it. He’ll die here, or he won’t. Either way, he’ll never see the light of day again.

And Alex’s voice in his ear, a murmuring like a gypsy’s charm, a Parisian lullaby.

_“Ton visage est caché.”_

The door bursts open, voices in a flurry and guns in his face and Arthur, he hurls the phone hard at the window, so that it smashes through the glass and shatters to the ground below.

.

.

 _Defender of Men,_ his name means.

Arthur believes that one.

.

.

Before it _begins,_ it began.

It began with the blur of dreamdom. An imaginary sprawling of what could have come, in time, between their youthful, sapling dreams.

It began before Arthur was Arthur.

Jeremy, sixteen years old, sitting pretty on his fearless confidence. Beside him, a sandy southern boy with years on him.

Brandon, green eyed as a bad-luck-cat, with a well of patience the likes of which Jeremy Howard had never before encountered.

It began with a solitary dream.

Jeremy was in the fourth set of dreamers, a seat in a sleep lab like a doctor’s office. Charts on the walls and diagrams of REM activity like colour spectrums, his heart fluttering between his lungs, out of place.

At the top of his file, _Dreamer184G2._

He’s digging his heels into the floor, swinging them to and fro.

“Nervous?” the chemist asks.

She’s got smiling eyes and thin lips. She writes in low, looped words above the lines of the page instead of on them.

Her _r_ and _v_ lower cases are identical.

Jeremy shakes his head.

It’s not _nerves,_ it’s _not._

“I am,” Brandon says from his other side, and the chemist grins and Jeremy scowls because of course Brandon isn’t. He’s only saying that to be _kind._

Jeremy has no use for kindness. Especially from Brandon Osmond, who is older and wiser and who is only saying he’s nervous to try make Jeremy admit it, too.

Jeremy scowls at the floor sullenly and Brandon makes eyes at their chemist when he thinks Jeremy isn’t looking.

“Chin up, Jaybird,” Brandon says, and his eyes crinkle at the corners with sunshine lines.

Jeremy tries not to smile back.

The chemist gives them both another of those light, discerning looks, before nudging them to recline back in their seats. Jeremy looks down at the needle taped into his arm. There’s a tiny purple ring around the entry point, that even now he knows will ache when he presses it, later.

“Now, I’m giving you each ten minutes, alright?” the chemist says, and her eyes dart inexpertly to the large window behind which, concealed by blinds, they are being watched on lots of little screens by a dozen men and women in white coats.

Jeremy nods, and he sees Brandon’s wheat-chafed hair move as he nods, too.

“Don’t worry if you wake up before it times out,” she says in a gentle tone, like she’s talking to kindergarteners at nap time.

Jeremy’s fingers curl into his palms, and he sees the needle in his arm shift just a little. He buries the urge to press it down deeper.

Then the chemist goes to the machine next to Brandon and turns a vial latch. Brandon’s green, green eyes slide shut.

She does the same to Jeremy, and he catches her eye right before his own also fall shut as a rush of darkness takes hold.

He must have imagined it, the look of devastation in her eyes as she watched him drop to sleep.

.

.

He wakes up, fuzzy and nauseous. He can smell vomit, and through the teary blur of his eyes, he sees Brandon on the floor, doubled over and heaving into a red and yellow splatter.

Jeremy takes a breath, and there’s a man standing over him, flashing lights in his eyes that make his head burn and his stomach flip.

“What do you remember?” the man asks, as if there isn’t another boy heaving his guts up four feet away.

Jeremy blinks, tries to lick his lips but he can’t feel his tongue.

Then he says, croaky between the convulsions in his stomach.

“There was a house? With a yellow door. And a bicycle.”

The man beams at him, and without so much as a glance at Brandon he rushes towards the observation window, waving an arm and saying, too loudly for Jeremy’s swollen eardrums,

“We’ve got another one!”

.

.

“This is G-Two,” the man, whose name is Lomas, says every time he introduces Jeremy to new recruits or visiting officials. “His dream caught on his first try.”

People look at him wide eyed, sometimes, which is when they’re impressed. Sometimes, their eyes are narrow, full of distrust and resentment.

One of the newcomers calls him R-Two, instead, which means nothing to Jeremy until he tells Brandon, who laughs and says,

_“Like Star Wars, you dumbass.”_

.

.

Brandon calls him Jaybird.

He prefers that to G-Two.

.

.

**(to the north)**

.

.

Jeremy Howard, who will one day be Arthur, leaves home exactly one week after his sixteenth birthday.

One year later, still an entire two years away from ever being called Arthur, he joins the military dream cadets, which he soon discovers entails doing everything he’s been doing already for the past year, just with a stricter uniform and even more rules.

Brandon doesn’t come with him, which shouldn’t surprise him, but it does. It shouldn’t hurt, either, but it does.

“What are you talking about?” he splutters, standing in the dormitory doorway, watching Brandon carefully fold his clothes only to stuff them carelessly into a duffle bag.

Brandon’s shoulders are curved, and he’s standing less than his usual six-feet-plus as he glances haphazardly around the room for anything he’s missed. There are rings around his grass-glade eyes.

The lab time has been taking its toll on them all, but Jeremy thinks it might be more noticeable on Brandon, the way it’s flushed the glow out of his swamp state tan. Or perhaps he’s just more attuned to this man than all the others that surround him.

“It’s a good opportunity, Jaybird,” Brandon says in a rehearsed, pragmatic manner that doesn’t suit him.

And young fluttering Jaybird shakes his head, squawking,

“No, what, no. They’re _all_ good opportunities, Brandon. You don’t need to go to the other side of the country for good opportunities.”

Brandon’s head is bowed, his mouth zipped tight, and Jeremy looks at it too long. He does that, sometimes. He looks at the upturned bow of Brandon’s mouth, in the desperate hope it will curve into a smile.

It does, usually. Not this time.

Brandon’s lost weight, more than Jeremy, more than most. He never took to the somnacin like Jeremy did, he still wakes up feeling nauseous almost every time they go under.

“You don’t have to go,” Jeremy says, and he doesn’t know it yet, but he’ll say that again, to another man one day, and the thing is, he’ll wear the exact same face that Brandon makes right now.

Displeased and frightened and bullish and crass.

“I want to go,” Brandon says, and that other man, he’ll say that, too.

There are circles in Jeremy Howard’s life, interlocking circlets of time that repeat themselves in labyrinth loops. He will love, and they will leave, and then they’ll come back. He will love, and he will leave, and they will die.

Jeremy doesn’t understand that yet, though. Not the way he will when he isn’t Jeremy anymore, the way _Arthur_ does.

Right now, he is still only Jeremy, and he doesn’t yet fully appreciate that when he stares at Brandon Osmond’s mouth it’s not because he just likes the uptick of his smile, but because what he actually wants more than anything is to know what that smile tastes like, the same way he wants to know the taste of sunshine.

Right now, he doesn’t _want_ the way he will.

“Jaybird,” Brandon says, on that downwards scale of a sigh, like he’s exhausted, like his Jaybird is exhausting him.

“Please, Brandon.”

His eyes pierce him like a hawk, like a predator too lazy to make chase.

“You’re seventeen,” Brandon says, like that means anything. “The cadet training is perfect for you.”

Brandon isn’t seventeen, and it’s not that Jeremy forgets, it’s just that, well. He forgets, sometimes.

He’s always felt older than his years, and dreaming hasn’t helped.

Last week, he dreamt a dream that lasted four months, and he’d be halfway to eighteen by now if it was real, except it wasn’t.

Doesn’t it count for something, though?

“You’re not exactly hitting middle aged, Brandon,” Jeremy replies hotly, because there’s not even half a decade between them, even though he thinks that’s not the point.

“No,” Brandon replies with a stuttering laugh, trapped in the limbo suspense between amused and discomfited. “But this is what _I_ want to do.”

There is no reasonable response to that beyond blanket agreement.

Jeremy hangs his head in limp anguish, and for the first time perhaps ever, the anticipation of his own loneliness stretches out before him like a vast, gaping chasm.

Brandon’s hand is warm on his head, then his shoulder.

“Come on,” he says, doting encouragement that used to feel safe, and now feels horribly tentative. “It’s a good thing. You’ll be fine. You _are_ fine. Jaybird, you’re the best they’ve got, you would be stupid not to sign up for the programme.”

Jeremy swallows the lump in his throat, only to feel it grow spikes.

“I know,” he whispers at his feet.

Brandon laughs.

“Yeah, you do,” he replies.

Jeremy doesn’t know if he’s imagining the choked-up stutter in Brandon’s voice, but he hopes he isn’t. He doesn’t look up before wrapping his arms around Brandon’s chest in a vicious hug, because honestly, he doesn’t want to find out for sure.

.

.

He’s seventeen, and the cadet training, it isn’t perfect for him.

He, on the other hand, is perfect for the cadet training.

.

.

(It’s not the same thing, not at all, not even a little bit.)

.

.

He signs up. He works hard.

Lomas writes his recommendations for him and he’s ever so grateful, and the military opens up its big Uncle Sam arms so wide to encase him in a spine-crushing embrace. He folds himself up, the same way his name is a folded-up Bible passage.

He meets a man called Simon O’Keefe, precisely two years older than he is. Precisely, because they have the same birthday.

They share their celebrations three years in a row, which conveniently makes it easy for Jeremy to slip through the ID cracks unnoticed, him with his teenager’s face.

Simon is brawny and tough; he gets into trouble a lot and he’s impervious to the judgement of others.

Jeremy thinks it’s different to his own imperviousness, though. Most of the time, the looks he gets, he thinks they don’t bother him because he’s missing something.

Simon O’Keefe, on the other hand, doesn’t miss anything. He just doesn’t care at all.

For some reason, he takes a liking to Jeremy. And he says, one time,

“You know, Jer, there’s only one place worse for gossips than a sorority house, and that’s the United States military.”

They’re in the Mess Hall, and Simon’s grumpy, and Jeremy is bored.

“What’ve they done now?” young Jeremy asks, in a voice that he won’t perfect until his name is Arthur.

Simon grimaces at his forkful of potatoes like he’s considering flinging them over his shoulder.

“You heard them talking about the Black Ops in Europe?” he asks.

Jeremy laughs, then, a sound dryer than the offensive potatoes.

“It’s all Hetherton and Alloy will talk about,” he replies truthfully.

“Idiots,” Simon spits. “It ain’t nothing to joke around about. Did you hear about Warsaw?”

.

.

Two months before the name _Arthur_ is uttered _,_ two months before he goes to a bar off-base and waves his fake ID around a little loosely for the first time, he stands in an office and he asks,

“Did you really work on the extractions in Warsaw?”

The man sitting at the desk will have eyes of steel, and his lip will curl like a minotaur’s bite.

“Where on earth did you get that idea?” he’ll ask.

His name will be Captain Garnett, but Arthur will quickly come to know him as simply _Alex._

Later, he’ll be Eames, but even then, he won’t talk about Warsaw. He won’t talk about a lot of things.

.

.

**(vines that creep, tender leather)**

.

.

Captain Alexander Garnett gives a lecture on mirage theory when Jeremy Howard is seventeen years old.

He stands up front with his toothy English smirk and frostbite eyes and he looks down at Jeremy with a tight, dismissive energy that Jeremy hasn’t received since he left home over a year ago.

Captain Alexander Garnett is a _forger._

Jeremy isn’t too proud to admit that _that,_ if nothing else, makes him sit up a little in his seat.

“Very few of you with have the means to become a forger,” the Captain says. “The principles, however, are imperative to grasp if you want to make the very most of the dreamscapes you are inhabiting. It’s _mirage_ theory for a reason, gentlemen, not _illusory._ We are creating what the subject requires, not the dreamer.”

Later that day, as the cadets sit in the Mess Hall barely eating for their chatter, Jeremy feels a nudge to his arm.

He looks up to see Feller, a twenty-year old Californian who still holds the record for the longest controlled dream sustained out of a lab environment. His eyes are narrowed suspiciously.

“What’s got your brain ticking?” he asks quietly, playing with the bread roll in his hands.

Jeremy shrugs nonchalantly and Feller obviously doesn’t believe him.

“You’re signing up, aren’t you?” he asks. “Going international.”

Jeremy tries not to react. His mouth twitches around a hopeful smile.

Feller’s the only one in their squad who never showed any kind of resentment for Jeremy getting picked up by the generals for the advanced programme, despite his age.

“Do you think they’d take me on?” Jeremy asks, feeling awfully sheepish.

Even more so when Feller bursts out laughing.

“Are you kidding me? They’ll be lucky to have you. No way in hell would they say no.”

He looks like he means it, too. Jeremy grins, shoving a forkful of peas into his mouth before he can say anything else foolish. Feller’s fingers snag playfully in his hair as he ruffles at Jeremy’s head and for the first time, Jeremy doesn’t immediately pull away from the touch.

(It’s only been three months since he said goodbye, but sometimes, he misses Brandon more than he ever even missed his parents.)

He thinks back on what the Captain said, the way he spoke so confidently, so _easily_ about concepts Jeremy’s been wading through like muddy scree for months now.

After dinner, he goes to Lieutenant-Colonel Colcan, stands in perfect posture and says,

“The international branch, sir.”

And Colcan, he just smirks and says,

“I thought as much. Good luck, Howard. You’ll make a fine addition to Colonel Wallace’s team.”

At the time, it had sounded like a compliment.

.

.

A year later, Jeremy gets stationed at Washington DC Somna Base permanently.

He’s a Lieutenant, and the youngest member of his team. He recognises one of the men immediately, a firework of surprise the likes of which he’s never experienced before. Fourth of July in his heart, feathery and light.

In the quiet retirement of the barracks, he hears a desert crawl lilt say,

“Well, Jaybird, what a sight for sore eyes you are.”

Jeremy looks up at Brandon Osmond, who’s wearing Sergeant stripes and standing ever so tall, with his startling green eyes and tufted blond hair. Jeremy smiles a kind of smile he didn’t realise he had in him.

“You’re here,” he says and Brandon nods.

“So are you,” Brandon says, sounding just as pleased.

.

.

In a few short years, Brandon Osmond will die and it will be blamed on a car bomb.

Only, there will be bruises littering him that are days old and blood on his brain and Jeremy, whose name won’t be Jeremy anymore but _Arthur,_ will know he died for nothing but spite and misdirected rage.

.

.

(He’ll know that Brandon Osmond died for _him.)_

.

.

There’s a moment, when everything else vanishes, that Arthur cannot forget.

Eames’ face, very close to his own, their mouths sticky against each other. His hand holding the back of Arthur’s neck, crushing safe, and the other down his pants, crushing pleasure.

And Arthur, he tries to reciprocate but his heart in cloven in two and the world is all grey, grey but for the blue in Eames’ eyes.

“Please, please, please,” he whimpers and he grasps at Eames’ shirt, at his belt loops, and Eames kisses away his tears and squeezes the sobs out of his throat.

“I’m here,” Eames says.

“I’m not leaving,” Eames says.

“You’re safe, you’re safe, you’re safe,” Eames says.

That last one probably isn’t for Arthur’s sake.

There’s a moment, pressed into the space between memories, when Arthur can’t remember anything except the wet heat of Eames’ tongue, the dry heat of his hands, and his tender voice saying into the cry of his mouth,

“There’s nothing you can do, love. Nothing at all.”

.

.

When he is sixteen, they meet in the afternoon, bellies full of scraps and minds hungrier than ever.

“Howard, you’ll be paired with Osmond,” the woman in the white coat says. Jag Nine-One, her name was, and like all the other Jags she was a stickler for the rules.

Osmond, one of the new ones fresh from the New York Lab.

He’s tall, with sharp green eyes and soft blond hair. He talks like California stone dipped in Louisiana cream and Jeremy doesn’t understand at the time the ferocious burning in his gut as they shake hands, boys wearing the mannerisms of men.

“Brandon,” the older boy corrects under his breath.

“Jeremy,” the younger boy replies, and his dimples show for the first time in weeks.

Brandon is clever and brave and older than Jeremy. He does everything by the book, except for one thing.

.

.

**(coral green)**

**.**

**.**

“What a pleasant surprise, Young Arthur, without his knights,” the Captain says.

He’s not a Captain right now, though. He’s a handsome man in a bar with the first two buttons of his blue shirt undone; a tan set bronze into his clavicle and a prominent Adam’s apple that Jeremy can’t help but stare at.

“Why am I Arthur?” he asks, bristling when the Captain starts to explain it’s an _English legend,_ like Jeremy is an imbecile, or maybe a neglected child.

He tests the weight of it on his tongue.

_Arthur._

It’s still six letters, still two vowels and four consonants. One less syllable, though.

_Arthur._

Doubling the _r_ instead of the _e._

The Captain is laid back, right down to the slouch of his arm across the back of the cushioned bench he’s sitting on. The low light of the bar does him favours; the hallow glint in his eyes is hidden, here.

“What should I call you?” the newly crowned Arthur will ask three beers later, and his teasing will come out too earnest, and he’ll remember his years, blushing.

The Captain, who is _Alexander;_ the name of a thousand descendants, Sacha and Lysander and Alex.

He’ll sip his drink, a gin and tonic full to the brim with limes, and say,

“Eames. You can call me Eames.”

Arthur won’t call him that, though. Not for another five years. Not until a man called Dominick Cobb claps him on the back and says,

“Eames, Arthur. I think we’re going to do some pretty great work here.”

Sitting in that bar, with its inky light and loud music, Young King Arthur asks,

“Are you going to teach us how to forge?”

Alex’s eyes shutter, grey wind in a blue sky.

He pulls back, not physically, but Arthur feels it across the table.

“You won’t be any good,” the Captain says, and he sips his drink and Jeremy-yet-Arthur hungers for the challenge of it.

.

.

What he should have asked is, _How do you learn how to forge?_

Because if he’d known, he’d never have asked again.

.

.

**(that envious glint)**

**.**

**.**

So, it comes to this. Abandoned flats in Brazil and a whispered conversation that tastes better than a dead man’s last meal, because it lingers like kisses on his face in a breeze.

Arthur throws his phone hard out of a window.

A man shoots a hole in the wall a bare inch from his head.

Another shouts something in Portuguese and Arthur responds in obstinate Spanish.

He has nowhere to run. He can get taken down semi-peaceably, or he can get taken down with a bullet.

If he’s lucky the bullet will hit something vital and he’ll bleed out.

Arthur doesn’t live by luck, so Arthur folds on his knees and backchats in Spanish and puts his hands behind his head.

They cuff him and they blindfold him and only then do they knock him out with a jab of a syringe in his neck.

.

.

Arthur wakes up on a plane and comes very close to choking on his own vomit before they realise and let him up.

Once his stomach lining is stinking up the cabin, they try to strap him back down again.

The first man yells when his arm snaps clean at the elbow. The second doesn’t yell when his neck breaks between Arthur grabby hands.

The third dodges his kick easily; gets his forearm across Arthur’s windpipe and says quietly in his ear,

_Ssh, ssh now, down you go, that’s it, there you go._

.

.

The next time Arthur wakes up he’s in a chair, locked in a humid prison cell.

He’s alone.

He stares up at the security cam in the corner, waiting for the camera to blink first.

He already has no idea how much time has passed.

.

.

There’s blood in his nostrils, tacky and itchy and making everything smell of copper. He hasn’t tried to speak yet, but he can feel the bruises inside his throat, the _whoosh_ of air stinging every breath.

The chair is hard and he’s tied down tight. Chafed bruises on his wrists and his bones are stiff.

Arthur closes his eyes and tries to catalogue the state of himself. There’s a distinct dipped-in-syrup feel to his limbs that makes him think he’s probably not entirely drug-free yet.

He can feel cuts in his lip and tight tinges in his ribs.

The room gives him nothing when he looks around; bare concrete plaster and little in the way of furnishings.

He’s positioned facing the door, which is yet to open.

There are dark dizzy spots in the corners of his vision, but he’ll file that under _drugged up and dozy_ for now.

It’s around this time he’d start thinking about how to contact Eames, usually.

Only, he doesn’t think about Eames at all this time.

On the contrary, he shoves aside the mental picture of his face, the memory of how he looked sleeping with a dead cigarette in his hand in Bratislava. The taste of his name in his mouth.

Arthur pushes these thoughts away with violence, holds instead perfectly the image of Mallorie Cobb, her laughter and the way she would eat ice cream for breakfast on her birthday.

They can’t harm the dead, after all.

And in any case, the memory of her is already spoiled, poisoned by the ghost Cobb mistook for his darling wife.

They can’t ruin her any more than her husband did.

Arthur loved Mallorie Cobb. That is an unchangeable fact. She shielded him in life and there’s no question that she would happily have shielded him in death, too.

The security camera is still staring at him, and Arthur sits in his chair and breathes shallow breaths and he waits.

The door opens.

His breath hitches against his will when it happens, an instinctive flinch.

A woman enters; her hair is blonde and grey, and she’s wearing a pencil skirt suit with a sky-blue blouse. She looks ready for a business meeting, or perhaps an appointment at the bank.

He knows her face, knows her name.

“Jeremy,” she sighs, like he’s a puppy that’s pissed on her new carpet. “You know, I honestly didn’t think Osmond had it in him.”

Arthur doesn’t react.

Arthur is too busy picturing Mal’s face whenever they completed a job, the jabber of her French and the lipstick stains she purposefully left on Dom’s cheek whenever she could.

He looks at the blonde-grey and he sees those ebony waves tied up in a pink scrunchie.

“He convinced all of us you were really dead.”

The woman is still talking.

Arthur bites down hard on his tongue, the muscles in his face seizing and aching, he’s dizzy with sadness and he imagines the way Mal looked, swollen and glowing, tears in her eyes when she figured out the truth.

“Do you remember my name?” the woman asks, and Arthur wants to reply, _I can barely remember my own name,_ but he doesn’t.

“Grace,” he says instead.

A cold cut smile splits his lips further and he adds,

“I believe that’s what they call a misnomer.”

Grace Rigby, her name is. She laughs at that, just a little sound, a token gesture.

“And Arthur Brandon,” she retorts, eyebrows arched in high pencil lines of sheer, cliff-face disdain. “I believe that’s what they call wishful thinking.”

Arthur just smiles, and ignores every impulse in his thrumming, syrup-dipped body, and remembers the way all Mal’s dreams had the same constellations in their skies.

“I’m going to extract every shred of your subconscious, Jeremy,” Grace Rigby says, leaning down a little, teacher to pre-schooler.

Arthur shrugs his shoulders as best he can and says,

“Please, try your very best.”

Then he closes his eyes, and he waits.

She unclips him from his chair and he doesn’t bother trying to get up, just lets the ties slide off him and the bruises bloom in the blood rush.

Then they leave him alone.

.

.

They leave him alone for long time.

**.**

**.**

**(that seashore flint)**

**.**

**.**

Arthur falls in love with a man called Alex.

A handsome, discourteous Captain who dreams the way others breathe; who says _I looked everywhere for you_ and who also says, _Your military have particularly strong ideas, Lieutenant._

Alex is smart and mean and cares deeply for his unit. Arthur falls in love with him between one breath and the next, all at once, astounded.

Then, Alex changes his name to Eames.

Arthur can’t fucking stand Eames.

Eames is handsome and discourteous. He dreams the way others breathe; he’s smart and mean and cares deeply for himself.

Only, Eames loves Arthur the way Alex never could.

It hurts. It hurts in a _wrong time, wrong place_ kind of way; in an _in another life_ kind of way.

.

.

It hurts in a way that says _if I didn’t give up my sanity and you didn’t give up your hope, we might have been magnificent._

.

.

One day in June, Paris bright and sun-washed.

Arthur stands over a new architect, Ariadne Sommerson, pointing out flaws in her exit routes. The second level, a hotel that Arthur will carry in his mind, where in just a few short weeks he’ll defend it without gravity. He’ll use his imagination and he’ll be awfully smug about it, later.

Ariadne Sommerson is confident and determined and she moulds herself beautifully around his criticisms. She smells of lavender soap and laughs like white wine in a bottle.

A door opens and their eminent extractor Cobb strides in, followed by a phantom of Arthur’s memories.

“Who’s that?” Ariadne asks, and Arthur ignores the generic attraction in her voice, the kind that colours a lot of voices around this particular phantom.

“Our forger,” Arthur says. “Eames.”

Eames doesn’t look at them when he enters. He is engaged in conversation on the cell phone pressed to his ear, speaking too quietly to be heard across the warehouse. He’s put on a little weight, which is to be expected. He always gets lazy when he spends too long in Kenya.

“Have you worked with him before?” Ariadne asks, and Arthur barely contains his laugh, smooths it over with calm, glancing indifference.

“Yes,” he replies.

Eames’ eyes, accusing oceans in a face Arthur’s fingertips remember better than his own.

When Ariadne’s head is bowed over her model of the hotel’s third floor, Eames blows a kiss at Arthur, mirthful and silent.

Arthur recoils from the sting of it, and his ache for solitude is a bruise inside his lungs.

.

.

 _I’ve had an idea,_ Arthur will say later, and Eames will look up at him through soft gold eyelashes with his stretched lips bruising pink and he’ll raise his eyebrows as if to say, _Is now really the time?_

Arthur will stare up at the ceiling, Eames’ hair bunched between his fingers and the hotel room air cold across his thighs.

_The architect could do it._

Eames will hum his disagreement, fingernails gouging thigh muscle, and the vibrations will run through Arthur like a drill.

 _Yes, she could,_ he will reply in a gasp.

They won’t talk about it again, not until Arthur’s crouched in an abandoned block of flats in São Paolo and Eames is so far out of reach the distance burns like overworked muscles. There won’t be room for argument that time, either.

.

.

Arthur falls in love with a man called Alex.

Before Arthur, his name is Jeremy.

Before Alex, there is Brandon.

.

.

 _(They killed him,_ he’ll scream into Alex’s chest, and Alex won’t say anything, as if he knew they would.)

**.**

**.**

**(on a stone you planted)**

.

.

When Arthur gets caught, he’s kept in a cell for twenty-four days without seeing another human being.

He’s always been a light sleeper, yet in all that time he never sees someone delivering him food. He drifts without meaning to, and when he wakes, there’s a tray of starch and a less than generous portion of fruit or veg.

He toys with the idea that they’re drugging him through the vents, but he decides it would be far too much effort. The building is old, too old to have a ventilation system airtight enough to pump drugs through it without gassing everyone.

In the end, he accepts it’s sheer exhaustion that’s sinking his sleep pattern. His body has nowhere to go, but his mind has never been busier.

It occurs to Arthur that they think they’re torturing him with solitude, that starving him of attention and human contact will quicken the slide into madness.

It probably will, eventually.

Except, right now? Arthur doesn’t want company.

Right now, Arthur is systematically remembering and suppressing every single shred of evidence he can recall that might lead them to someone important.

When a PASIV is unavailable to physically distort one’s subconscious, there are only two tools necessary to do it while conscious.

Silence and solitude.

And Arthur, he’s gifted it in abundance.

.

.

Arthur knows he’s going to die here, in this cell.

It doesn’t worry him like it should.

.

.

What worries him is that he’s going to die without any of the memories he carries closest.

He’s going to die with no recollection of _him._

.

.

He counts the cracks in the dry wall. He counts the minutes of the hours and the hours of the day.

By his calculations, they’re feeding him once every fourteen hours.

He drops to sleep somewhere amidst the purge of his thoughts and every time he wakes up he feels heavier, emptier. There are thorns in his head that he thinks might once have been pillows; barbed wire scratches that once were kisses.

It’s not that he’s forgetting, not really. It’s all still there.

Like blood under his fingernails, or sand caught in his scalp.

Pieces of him are shrinking into their smallest forms, little nuclei of ideas that were once fully-fledged memories, creeping back into their shells.

For over three weeks, he holds his breath.

Then he falls asleep, and when he wakes up, there are three men in his cell.

Two of them are armed, wearing the same cheap cuts as the guards who had flanked the ferreting Grace Rigby.

The third, centrepiece of the grand display, he recognises. They’ve never met, not officially, but Arthur knows him all the same.

Jag Six, Simon O’Keefe had called him, with a hush of awe that had frightened Arthur.

His real name, however, is Darren Robertson. Arthur knows this, because Arthur met Robertson’s finest work.

Arthur fell in love with Robertson’s finest work, and that is the thought that really makes him sick.

.

.

 _I liked him, at first,_ he said one night. _It felt like he rescued me. I thought at least he was the lesser of two evils._

His words left stains in the pillow, his mouth a wound. He didn’t like talking about it, the reality of his many masks.

_I was so stupid. I was so, so stupid._

.

.

“Hello, _Arthur,”_ Darren Robertson says, and Arthur understands instantly.

He’s got a manner about him, does Robertson. It’s not quite charm, not quite tyranny. It’s an authoritative elegance, a sense of strength and measure that makes him seem so utterly in control, so capable, dependable, those good and true marks of a hero.

Robertson is tall, salt-and-pepper speckled and his aftershave is strong.

Arthur blinks, his head tilted just so, a curious owl.

“I’m going to make you a one-time offer, _Arthur,”_ Robertson continues.

He’s got a handsome, creased smile.

Arthur raises his eyebrows politely, the muscles in his face stiff from underuse.

“If you tell me, right now, the name of your partner, I’ll make sure they go easy on you.”

Arthur blinks again.

Sometimes, he feels like he never left those classrooms from his childhood. Maybe this is all one big, closed-loop of a dream. Maybe he’s still sitting at the back of Mr Schultz’s class, staring idly at the chalkboard full of doodlings about Vonnegut and Fitzgerald and Williams, wondering why he’s been cursed with the company of stupid people.

He wasn’t an awful teenager, he knows that now.

He wasn’t great either.

“You don’t have many options,” Robertson says, impatient, a snort like a bull through his bristled moustache; mouth underlined by his goatee. “You don’t have any friends here, Arthur. You got a lot of good people killed.”

Arthur blinks again.

Robertson’s voice definitely sounds a little choked, a little hard at the edges, as if he’s toughening up, as if he goes to bed thinking about all those boys and girls he lost to the dreamshare. The ones he tortured into new skins, moulded them with all the grace of a toddler mashing at plasticine.

His eyes, though. They are mirrors, they are shards; they belong to magpies and to coyotes.

Somewhere in their staring contest, the men behind Robertson have moved. Arthur hadn’t noticed.

They’re behind him, and he’s sitting idle on the floor, he could turn, maybe, he could look and see. He doesn’t want to. He can’t bear to. He thinks perhaps if he turns around, it will be futile. He will be dead.

So, he just looks at Robertson instead.

Arthur blinks again.

“You were twenty-one years old,” Robertson says, in a voice of awe and fear, the exact same way Simon always talked about Robertson, and the way that Dolos never did. “And you decided you knew better than everyone else.”

It’s an instinct. He doesn’t mean to, doesn’t want to, but the words burst out of him like the blast of a bullet through the barrel of a gun.

“I was sixteen when they put me in a coma just to see how long it would take me to get out of it.”

And Robertson, he smiles.

He smiles, and it hurts. It hurts more than Arthur ever thought it would. He’s afraid of that smile, more afraid than he’s been in a long time because even if Arthur is as truly contemptible as these men around him seem to think, even if at twenty-one he had committed atrocities worthy of his suffering, that wasn’t true when he was sixteen.

That’s why it hurts.

It hurts because whatever he deserves now, he hadn’t deserved it then, and maybe that’s what all this was. Maybe he was just earning his suffering in retrospect, karma in reverse. Maybe he needed to earn it, to make it feel less desperately unfair, that someone had been able to look at his sixteen-year-old self and say, _Yes, he deserves that._

Yet even now, right this very second, a man who had personally held and crushed in his bare hands more lives than Arthur ever purposefully did, he still smiles down at Arthur like he’s a penny in a puddle, not worth plucking out.

“Who is Dolos, Arthur?”

There’s a picture in Arthur’s mind, blurred and overexposed. A wind-chafed smile across a sunlit bedroom and a hand around a glass of rosé wine.

The feathery feel of sun-kissed hair between his fingers and the indent of crooked teeth at his throat.

Arthur blinks again.

Once upon a time, Dolos asked, _Do you love me now?_

And Arthur, he replied, _No._

“Ask me again,” Arthur whispers, and when he blinks again his eyes are closed.

_Do you love me now?_

“Who is Dolos, Arthur?”

Arthur folds his arms around his knees, and he can hear the rattle of metal on metal, a gate slamming shut, handcuffs against a cycle rack.

“No,” he whispers around a grinning lie, and he can taste their sweat, feel a hand perfectly clasped over a bruise on his hip.

 _Oh, darling,_ Dolos said, like he’d never seen Arthur before.

“Go on then,” a voice says, hard-edged, authoritative elegance.

Arthur feels his brow crease, he blinks, blinks with open eyes that are blurred with tears.

A needle stings into his neck, just shy of too deep. He curls inwards, dead spider legs and a kicked dog squirming.

There’s a rush of blood through his ears, nausea like the first dream he ever remembered. A sound drops out of him and into the ether, where it cannot be reclaimed.

It gets bad, then. Bad like their worst jobs. Bad like a coma he can’t clamber out of; sixteen-years-old and screaming in his bed.

.

.

The man, Lomas, with his clipboards and his curly black hair and his freckled eyelids and his heart-shaped mouth. He was always pleased and angry. His fingers always pinched too hard and his voice was always a bark, even when it could have been a murmur.

“This is G-Two,” he used to say, pulling his pet out of the hutch to present it to the clapping crowds.

So, they’d look at him, the sullen boy in the spotlight, and they’d see a letter and a number.

They never knew his name, most of them. They never knew he was actually really good at biology and that he liked learning about medieval France; never knew that he was afraid of dogs or that his first word was _Cup._

They never knew any of that and they didn’t need to, they didn’t care.

He was G-Two, prize pony of the paddock.

“This is G-Two,” Lomas would say, and Jeremy Howard would shrink into his collar bones, until one day, Jeremy Howard vanished entirely.

.

.

They inject him with a cocktail of writhing asps; his very bones are contorted and his voice is hoarse and every time he opens his eyes he sees green-blue eyes and gold-wheat hair and he hears that voice, halfway between Houston and London, such a terrible and lovely thing.

He tries to claw his ribs out of his chest and when he comes to, there’s blood in the cracks of his palms and the skin of his own torso under his nails.

“Are you ready to have a more reasonable conversation, Mr Howard?” Grace Rigby asks.

He’d spit in her face if he had the saliva to do it.

Instead, he closes his eyes, and goes back to sleep.

.

.

**(inclining to the coil)**

.

.

Later, at the end, like a starter gun banging through the smoky air, where there is only this: the smell of peppery eggs, a familiar face, a big sky, blue eyes and a rattling tin.

 _What do you remember?_ he will ask.

 _I remember a lot of things,_ he will think, and it will be true, the truest lie of them all.

.

.

**(above)**

.

.

“Do you know why they’re called Jags?” Miles Alloy asks one day, when they are supposed to be doing anything other than gossiping.

Miles is a gossip though.

Miles is the all-rounder, the good guy with a spare ear and hand every day of the week. His shares food and jokes like he doesn’t know how to keep something for himself alone.

One day, Miles Alloy will shoot himself in the head. He’ll shoot seven others, first, including Arthur.

But not yet. 

“Do you know why they’re called Jags?” Miles Alloy asks, now, and his voice is even hungrier than his brightly lit eyes.

“Uh-oh,” someone drawls from further down the table. “He’s at it again.”

“Oh come _on,”_ Miles cries. “Don’t you want to know?”

“Let me guess,” Brandon says over their heads as he swings into his seat. “Jag like the car.”

There’s an outbreak of chattering laughter.

“No!” Miles says indignantly.

“Jag like the cat?”

“No!”

“Jag like a needle?”

“No!”

There’s a chorus of teasing and roundabout laughter at Miles’ disgruntlement. He scowls across the table at Arthur, who’s grinning, if not joining in.

“So, you _don’t_ know?” Miles says, and it’s irritating, if not unsurprising, that he directs the question at the young Lieutenant.

Lieutenant Howard has an unprecedented reputation for knowing things he shouldn’t.

Arthur shrugs one shoulder, eyebrows cocked, as if to say _maybe, maybe not._

He doesn’t know, of course. Nobody does. It doesn’t hurt to uphold an air of intrigue, though. Down the table, he sees a flash of a smile on Brandon’s face.

“They’re names,” Miles says.

“Uh, _duh,”_ Simon snorts from beside Arthur. “What’s new?”

Miles waves his hands in the air. He’s all fingers, this guy. He flaps them about like extra syllables when he speaks.

“No, it’s an acronym of _names.”_

“What names?” Ingman, tall and blond and sitting across from Brandon asks. Even he looks mildly curious, now.

Miles, whose sense of drama has always increased with his audience size, puffs up his chest importantly.

“Joshua and Greta.”

There’s another spike of tittering. Simon tosses a scrumpled ball of paper at Miles.

“Oh yeah, _great_ detective work, Alloy.”

“It’s true!” he insists. “When you get Jag status, you get a new identity. Every single man with Jag status gets the name Joshua and every woman is Greta. It’s to make it harder to differentiate them on paper.”

“You’re so full of shit,” Simon snorts.

He, of all the troupe, enjoys baiting Miles the most. He gets a glimmer of particular glee is in his eye when he manages to withdraw genuine squawking from the younger man, and by the looks of it this time, it won’t take much.

“I swear!” Miles cries, hands flapping and expression darkening. He looks to Arthur for support. “You believe me, right Howard?”

All eyes turn to Arthur, then, and he’s used to it by now, the clench of attention. He is surrounded by men who trust him, who have faith in him, and he always thought he’d shy from that kind of responsibility.

It’s been his making.

“Smells like bull to me,” he says, and he doesn’t grin, but everyone laughs anyway.

Miles sighs dejectedly.

“I heard it was for Jericho and Gomorrah,” someone else, maybe Kippich down at the end, says.

“Jericho?” Ingman splutters.

“Well they wouldn’t use _Sodom,_ would they?” Simon pipes in.

“Couldn’t have that,” Arthur agrees with a smirk, and there’s a crunch of something ugly in their laughter, that time.

Down the table, he can feel Brandon’s eyes burning his cheek.

For once, he doesn’t look back.

.

.

It becomes a game, and maybe it’s real or maybe it’s just playing, but a part of Arthur agrees with Miles Alloy.

He _wants_ to know.

.

.

 _Were you a Jag?_ he asks one day.

It’s out of the blue, which is the only way to get answers from Eames. Surprise them out of him.

Eames looks at him like he’s stupid, which he does often. Arthur holds firm, expectant.

He realises, then, Eames doesn’t think he’s stupid, quite the opposite. He’s surprised Arthur doesn’t know already.

Because Eames, sometimes he seems to think that Arthur knows everything.

 _Jag Seven-Nine-Four,_ he replies, and he doesn’t outright shudder, but he says it like he wants to. _I never used the number, though. Garnett was my cover._

_So they didn’t make you a Joshua?_

That’s when he feels stupid. When Eames’ mouth curls like a snake and his laugh sits under his tongue.

 _I wasn’t a Joshua,_ he says, and then he swallows Arthur’s questions down like water, before he can ask anymore.

He thinks about it later, though, when his hand lies damp and possessive on the small of Eames’ back, and sleep evades him the way it so often does.

Alexander Garnett.

His initials were AG, and really, two thirds can’t be a coincidence, can it?

He thinks about it, about how just maybe Miles was onto something. Maybe it was the names after all.

.

.

“Janus animo germinum,” Brandon says.

They’re in Cairo, in a kitchen nobody knows about.

Brandon’s cooking, and Arthur is staring at a map of Europe, and Brandon is pretending not to know why.

He’s good like that, kind like that. He waits for Arthur to say things, doesn’t demand answers the way everybody else does.

“What?” Arthur asks.

He’s had added to a new name to his likeness by now.

 _Carnus._ It seemed to fit nicely, felt good in his hand and on his tongue.

He signed a letter and sent it off and there’s been no reply yet.

He’s had three natural dreams since he got to Egypt, and in every single one, Alex has been dead.

Brandon stops stirring in the pan, turns with a hand on his hip to scrutinise him. There’s nothing heavier in this world, Arthur thinks, than Brandon Osmond’s full, undivided attention.

“I heard Ingman talking about it with one of the Captains out here,” Brandon says. “A new theory for the list.”

It’s not _Alloy’s_ list anymore.

Arthur’s got a scar north-east of his belly button, puckered and white, and it’s from the last bullet Miles Alloy fired before the one he put in his own mouth.

But the list, it’s outlived Miles. The game lives on.

“I don’t know if that’s accurate,” he replies.

He’s no expert at Latin, no expert at any language that isn’t English, so he’s not sure why he says it. French, though. He’s working on that one.

He thinks, maybe, he just doesn’t want the game to be over, and if ever there was going to be an answer to their question, it’s going to be in Latin.

“I like it,” Brandon says with a shrug, an explicit faking of nonchalance that is supposed to make Arthur feel bad for dismissing him too quickly.

What he hasn’t noticed yet, of course, is that Arthur, he feels bad all the time now. He doesn’t need added incentive.

“What is it?” he asks Brandon’s turned back. He watches the up-down of his broad shoulders, the gentle strength of his easy movements. The kitchen smells of softened tomatoes; the windows are all cracked open and the light that spills through, gold. “Something about twins.”

Brandon sighs into the pot, still stirring, and in the shift of his weight he can see a thready energy that doesn’t make sense.

“An aspiration, I guess,” Brandon says. “Twinning the doors to the mind. Or something, I don’t know. I thought it made sense.”

It’s been almost five years since they first met, in a sleep lab designed for rats and orphans.

Five years since _Chin up, Jaybird,_ and those crinkle-eyed smiles behind the chemist’s back.

What was once blind admiration has morphed. He’s Arthur now, even if to this man he’s still the cunning, cutting _Jaybird._ He sees what he couldn’t before.

A tinge of insecurity in the cocky kick of his legs, those green eyes piercing not because they see everything, but because they’re afraid of missing something. He’s indestructible, indefinable, and indefinitely kind, and Arthur still loves him like a teenager loves and hates everything.

Brandon, who is a Sergeant and who is charming and who is unbeatably loyal; who is the only person who never showed an ounce of resentment when they made the nineteen-year-old Lieutenant before anyone else.

Who thinks his Jaybird is awfully clever, and sometimes, lets his fear of not being smart enough catch up with him.

It always catches him off-guard, the twang of diffidence Brandon shows at the oddest of moments. Arthur stares at his back, at his tawny head, and feels his chest fill up with lead and love.

“That does make sense,” he says, and then, before Brandon can get defensive. “Although I’ll be damned if I can tell you whether it’s accurate Latin or not.”

 _Twinning the doors to the mind._ If the Jags have done anything, Arthur supposes it’s that.

Brandon snorts, flash of green through thick lashes.

He flings a spoonful of tomato over his shoulder, warm and sopping, and it slaps its way over Arthur’s face with perfect precision.

“Wh –” Arthur gasps, shoving back his chair in shock and blinking through the tomato juice trickling down his face. “You bastard!”

Brandon laughs, a ringing, churning sound that fills the room and leaves no space for anything else.

Arthur grunts his disagreement, scoops some of the fleshy residue from his cheek and throws it back, where it hits the back of Brandon’s neck, sliding immediately down beneath the line of his shirt.

Brandon’s back arches in shock, and he wriggles until it leaks out on the floor. Red blooms through the white tank shirt in a line down his spine, and he wipes at his neck.

“Gross,” he chuckles, and looks tempted to throw another spoonful.

“Don’t even think about it,” Arthur warns him.

He sees it coming, this time, but it gets him in the chest anyway. The map is soaked, and the floor is hazardous, and Brandon’s laughter fills the kitchen, leaving just enough space for Arthur’s to join in.

.

.

 _You’ll need help getting out,_ Dolos says.

 _Osmond,_ Carnus replies.

He can still smell the cooking of the tomatoes, still hear the laughter and he knows, then, chest full of lead and love, looking across the table at a man he will follow for the rest of his life, he’s not Jaybird anymore.

.

.

**(a sacred thing)**

.

.


	2. PART TWO

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> His face.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Darlings,
> 
> **Part One has had an upgrade! It is about twice the length of the original posting, if not more. If you haven't read the new version, I suggest you do, because I covered a lot of ground and this is going to get complex.**
> 
> I hope, perhaps, one or two of you are still with me?
> 
> Love love,  
> LRCx
> 
> P.S. I'd like to think I'm not stealing from Labyrinth/Alice in Wonderland, so much as I am paying homage to a couple of classics.

.

.

When Arthur is twenty-one years old, he is officially declared dead by the United States military.

He lies in the charcoal shell of a burned-out truck for seven hours, while two kilometres away, the building his equipment says he is in chokes out thick acrid smoke.

He’s wearing dank civvies, shoes a size too small with makeshift laces and he’s got a rucksack under his knees, a knife in his belt and no other weapons to speak of.

Five days ago, somebody sent a collage of unauthorised data to every corner of dreamshare ops in existence, official or otherwise. It transpired in the subsequent kerfuffle that at least three UN PASIV devices are currently missing.

It couldn’t have been Arthur, because Arthur was in deep with two informants working out of central Kabul at the time.

One of them is now in a shallow grave underneath the truck where Arthur’s taken tetanus refuge.

The other is dressed in Arthur’s gear, slowly crisping to ashes in a building two kilometres away.

He lies in the truck for seven hours, until the sun has gone down, until he can wrap himself up in the shadows of ill-fated hearts.

Until he can clamber out of one tin cage and into another.

.

.

Four days later, Sergeant Brandon Osmond is declared dead, too.

.

.

Arthur never finds out what they did to him. Only that, whatever secrets they tore out of him before he died, there weren’t any pertaining to Arthur’s treachery.

It scars, that loss. He feels it forever, like the hooked claws of a blue jay in his heart.

It’s the only thing he truly regrets.

.

.

**(that hybrid hark)**

.

.

“How long are we safe here?” he asks, the day after Brandon Osmond’s body is blasted apart by a car bomb. It’s early morning, sunshine peeping around the corners of the blind covering the kitchen window.

It’s a cosy enough cottage, old stone built up in layers like a patchwork quilt. Every room bears the wonky, well-loved taste of _home_ to it, and it makes him feel nervous. The kitchen smells of brewing coffee and grease from the pan now empty on the hob.

Alex, sitting across the table from him, is still mopping up egg yolk from his plate with the last of his bread roll.

“If no-one’s followed us, as long as we like,” he replies.

His casual demeanour suggests he knows for a fact nobody has followed him. He doesn’t say as much, however, which Arthur appreciates; he knows Arthur’s not going to be satisfied by that notion until he’s checked for himself.

Only, he can’t bear the thought of getting out of his chair yet. His eyes are itchy, his face still feels hot, and he’s painfully aware of the hushing, shushing way Alex had held his hand for what must have been at least four hours last night, letting Arthur retch great sobs of anguish into his shirt, the jagging chin wobble of a child in torment.

Then, before Arthur can think of anything to say that won’t unpick the seal on that can of worms, Alex continues,

“I was thinking of buying this place for good.”

Arthur narrows his eyes, quickly brushing the bread crumbs from his own fingers, just for something to do with his hands that doesn’t involve vulgar gesticulations.

It’s an ill-kept chalet cottage in the backend of nowhere in New Zealand. The land is parched and alkaline blue, the insulation of the building is prehistoric and the central heating is the punchline to a joke.

It’s hardly going to cost much, but still.

“With what money, exactly?” he scoffs, a little more derisively than Alex probably deserves.

Alex, surprisingly unflappable in the early morning disquiet, shrugs.

“I’ll get some more.”

“How?”

He tries not to sound like he’s demanding, if only because that’s a sure-fire way to have his questions remain decidedly unanswered.

However, Alex must think he’s even more delicate than he feels, because he simply offers up a charmingly good-natured grin.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he says around a final mouthful of bread and egg. “Extraction jobs are getting very popular. Maybe I’ll forge a Francis Bacon and make a fortune.”

Perhaps he is still feeling delicate, the sheer rawness of the pain from yesterday’s revelation as to Brandon’s fate stealing away any scraps of intrigue he might otherwise cling to, but Arthur is honestly astounded. He can’t believe, truly, that Alex can think about ever working another extraction again.

Still chatting with effortless magnanimity, Alex keeps going.

“You’d make a fine point man,” he says, nodding assertively. “You’ve always been a sneaky stick in the mud.”

It’s difficult to say whether he’s being genuine or not, to unpick the layers of his intonations and figure out whether that’s a backhand of a compliment or a foreword of a jibe, so Arthur just stares impassively at him, refusing to encourage or discourage him.

Alex busies himself pouring their coffee into mugs, inadvertently giving Arthur the opportunity to get a proper look at him for the first time.

He’s slept.

Not well, but visibly better than Arthur has.

His deep, gold tan is patchy, lighter at the seams where his military uniform restricted the kiss of the sun. Less than a week in the tropics, though, and already his shoulders are catching up with his hands, all the cuts of clean skin where the tattooists haven’t mauled him.

The goose-feather tufts of his hair, finger threaded, make him seem younger than usual.

Arthur has never seen this corner of Alex before. He’s caught flashes of him, sometimes. Close quarters in Istanbul, sprawled unconscious in Cairo, ducking out of his hotel room in Atlantic City. Never, though, with just the two of them, never quite so exposed by his own skin and sin.

In the syrupy fog spread sticky over his thoughts, Arthur can’t find the grasping clutch he needs to savour it, this brief respite, this gift he’s less than secretly longed for. This is Alex, trusting him, more explicitly than he has done since they sat in a café in Cairo, discussing gypsy charms and tea leaves.

Whatever shows in his face in that moment, when Alex looks up to catch him staring, it must read all wrong.

Alex’s eyes are reservedly tender, his mouth set in an awkward line when he nudges a coffee cup across the table and says,

“It’s not your –”

“No thank you,” Arthur says, hurried and desperate words, the kind he should be used to by now but somehow it tastes different this time. “No thanks.”

Alex closes his mouth with a distinct click of his teeth. He scrutinises Arthur so carefully, so openly, all Arthur can do is sip his coffee in response.

He can feel the hand of grief digging its blunt fingers into the back of his throat, the abiding ache behind his eyes.

Alex knows what he’s lost; bore witness to the blunt trauma of it last night and it seems Arthur’s not the only one left reeling.

For a moment, they don’t speak. Staring back at each other across the rickety wooden table, separated only by the steam of their coffees and the sheerness of their obstinance.

Arthur can see it in his mind’s eyes, stretched before him like a great, fathomless void. All the things they have done, all the things they might yet do. Fade to black of a Gershwin tune and the pinprick murmur of a vinyl needle smudging on rubber.

Four months ago, sitting in the basement of a tin can block of flats, before they hooked themselves up to the hive mind of none other than Jag Nine-One, before they stole her passwords and her formulas, all the faces she’s ever worked for and the names of all her family pets to boot, Alex stopped him with a hand.

He was standing close, and Arthur could see in the greenish tinge of the light the sea-coloured secrets in his eyes, the smooth angle of his clean-shaven jaw and the crack of his dry lips.

“Thank you,” he had said, his finger resting over the pulse point in Arthur’s wrist; the bronze flutter of his eyelashes and the wet shine of his hair slicked back off his face, a ghost’s face, unearthed.

He’d never said it, before then.

Now, sitting in a cramped kitchen in New Zealand, clutching a coffee cup to his chin with his fingers covered in bacon grease and his ink-splattered arms bare gooseflesh in the chill, Alex has never looked further from Dolos, never looked more human.

Arthur looks at him, takes in their distance and their solitude and the unintentional, shared rhythm of their lungs, and he is surprised when, as a thin skin of milk forms on his coffee, Alex opens his mouth and says,

“You know, I really hated my mother.”

Arthur raises his eyebrows. Of all the possible avenues open for Alex to venture down, this isn’t one Arthur would have thought he’d make the first step towards willingly.

He’s wasted none too short an hour scouring through what meagre details can be wrenched from the tea leaf dregs of Alex’s family history.

His father, the sidestep of a Lord with more acres of land than might happily be walked in a day.

There was one photo, an engagement announcement in a newspaper. Henry Dalrymple and Sally Scott, clutching each other’s hands together, the austerity of their adoration severe even in grayscale print.

Alex has his father’s face; his father’s everything, really, the charm of attractive aristocracy. Tongue of silver barbs and a nose for good whisky; head full of Coleridge and Seneca.

It’s his temperament that gives him away as his mother’s son.

In the photo Arthur found, she bore the elegant demeanour of a corset mannequin, strung up with pearls and emboldened with make up that hooded her sultry dark eyes into caverns of mystery. The pinch of her mouth, though. The left facing angle of her jaw, hand of the devil.

She was born for dogfights and the rough straw of stables, and it reveals itself in Alex’s manner, oftentimes.

When Alex says, _I hated my mother,_ Arthur understands that it is an unjust, childish hatred, insurmountable in its depth and breadth. It is a hate that has consumed him, and one he wishes he could rid himself of.

Arthur never hated his mother, nor his father. Not even when they sold him off as the price of peace and an end to the quarrels of his youthful ineptitude.

He thinks, though, that this is not to his credit. He’s never thought on the matter of his parents with enough true consideration to have any feelings for them at all, hateful or otherwise. They are a non-sequitur in the fact of him.

And in any case, if any piece of him ever did belong to them, it was Jeremy Howard, who is five days dead now.

All the same, he finds he can’t say as much. Not in the face of Alex’s bare honesty, which feels at once more sanctimonious and justly deserved than Arthur’s drywall indifference.

He leans into the table, falling instead into his hunger for the details he cannot extract from what little backlog remains of Alex’s life before the military, and asks, grateful for the distraction,

“Why?”

Alex tips his imaginary hat off his head, his teeth worrying the corner of his smirk as he shrugs one shoulder. The dark glitter in his eyes betrays his deviousness, the hemlock of his whims.

“It was easy to blame my misery on her bad decisions,” he admits. “Once I was older and I understood better, I thought she was selfish for cheating on my father. Not because he didn’t deserve it, but because I wanted her to be cleverer than that. If she was going to hurt him, I wanted her to do it properly. Adultery was a lazy way out.”

Arthur doesn’t know if his parents have remained faithful to one another. Their attentiveness to each other wasn’t wholly loving, but they weren’t strangers. They were very much a pair; if a disjointed, irregularly argumentative one.

He does know, however, that that is not Alex’s point.

“I don’t think anyone is going to accuse us of taking the lazy way out,” he replies, just to see the bend of Alex’s smile.

“True,” Alex agrees. “We can just blame our misery on each other, then.”

Arthur snorts, humourless dimples and a thousand protestations caught in the back of his throat.

“How old were you when she left?” he asks.

He expects Alex to rebuke him. His eyes are iron, and his Adam’s apple works around several unvoiced retorts before he leans back in his chair, enquiring and trite in his watchfulness.

“Eight,” he answers. “I was eleven when she gave up on the custody appeals.”

He doesn’t sound upset by this; if anything, there’s a note of relief to it, the slump of his posture and the high altitude in his tone.

Arthur doesn’t know what to make of that. It doesn’t marry well with his hatred for her, or his apparent enlightenment, sitting in a cold kitchen on the wrong side of the world, miles between him and his past.

“Did you feel abandoned?” he asks.

This, on the other hand, is an experience Arthur is well acquainted with; Arthur has shares in abandonment, of his own making and against his will. There’s solace in solitude, nowadays.

Alex purses his lips, dipping his nose into his coffee cup without sipping it.

Arthur’s elbows inch over the table.

“I suppose I did,” Alex says, the words muted hollow by the innards of the mug. “But you’d know all about that, wouldn’t you?”

He wields his words with care, this man.

 _You can call me Eames,_ he said in Washington. Arthur tests it in the forefront of his thoughts, sometimes. _Eames._

The keystone of an alien lexicon, unfamiliar. In many ways, this Eames is as much of a stranger to him as the boy Alex was before uniformed knives carved him a new identity.

He’s never protested Arthur using Alex, and Arthur won’t give it up until he’s expressly told to. Until there is no choice but to call him anything else.

Arthur swallows his first response with more coffee, and his second.

“Abandonment is easy. It’s uncertainty that’s hard,” he says, and though he can feel the shadow beneath his heart at his own words, he believes the truth of them. “Hope is worse.”

Alex’s grin reveals a flash of teeth.

“There he is,” he says, leaving his coffee unfinished as he pushes himself up from his seat.

Arthur watches him, apprehensive thumbs rolling circles around the edge of his empty plate. The stress he’s carrying in his back and the way his fingers dart and flinch under the scalding hot tap as he scrubs a ball of steel wool over the greasy pan.

His movements are quick and methodical, and when he glances over his shoulder the amusement is still there, faint and fogged.

“You could go find them, if you wanted,” he says, and for a moment Arthur hasn’t the faintest idea what he’s talking about. Until, “Have a family reunion.”

Arthur remembers being thirteen years old; the look on people’s faces when they spoke to him, when he replied the wrong way. The crinkled noses and the smirks and the narrow eyes. The way his mom sighed very quietly, canary in the coal mine, when he didn’t understand her teasing.

Alex teases him a lot. Sly, pointed jokes with narrow windows that sometimes Arthur can only peer through, slots of white light hot and shimmering, illuminating only the acute angles of his deficits.

He jokes and Arthur navigates his responses and all the same, he still gets thrown sometimes.

“Are you making fun of me?” he asks.

Alex blinks, still holding the pan under the water as steam wafts out of the sink basin in reedy streams.

“Yes,” he replies, before turning back to the washing up.

There’s that, though; freefalling comfort, a misstep in the dark.

When Arthur asks, Alex answers.

He answers every time.

“Go get dressed,” Alex says, his bare neck bowed as he returns his attention to the fluffy soap on his burning pink hands. “We can call Angcroft later.”

.

.

 _“Mr Carnus, you’ve been busy,”_ Angcroft says, almost two weeks after the security breach that tore down Operation Oneiroi and all her sister projects.

Arthur’s standing in his bedroom when he makes the call, staring out of the window at the far horizon, where a lick of cat tongue pink has spread itself thinly between the faraway mountains.

“I trust you found our donation acceptable,” he replies, one hand on his hip and the other tight around his phone; his legs burning from the space heater he’s plugged into the wall.

Angcroft makes a preening, reptilian sound.

 _“An exemplary effort,”_ he says, his pleasure rounding his vowels into swollen balloons. _“I have to say, Carnus, I didn’t think you would pull it off.”_

“Rest assured, Mr Angcroft, we have retained copies for our own purposes. If word of this reaches unfriendly ears, we will know exactly who to call upon for answers.”

 _“A sentiment that did not necessitate voicing,”_ Angcroft points out, a little frostier at his implication. _“So, I must assume there is something else you require of me?”_

The winds are vicious today, cutting through the clouds. Even as Arthur watches, a smear of purple disperses outwards into the rose blossom blue of the sky.

“Somnacin, a case of it. On credit.”

 Angcroft scoffs, blustering breezy about the magnificent cost of such a demand.

Arthur slides the space heater to the side with his foot, so the rabid red bars of heat reach his knees.

“I recall, Mr Angcroft, you mentioned some difficulties with a cell at your Swiss border. Are you still having problems?”

Downstairs, he can hear the untidy rumble of Alex arguing with another of their buyers.

 _“No,”_ Angcroft replies in a stuffy, broken chin voice. _“They have been entirely quiet for almost a month now.”_

“How convenient for you,” Arthur says, before proceeding to wait far more patiently than Alex is clearly doing for Sali, Angcroft’s chief competitor, on his own phone call.

He can sense the hornet buzz of Angcroft’s thoughts.

Outside, he can see a healthy line of poplar trees, their branches trembling violently, leaves scattering in the wind with the force of their bend.

It’s beautiful here, more beautiful than a lot of places Arthur’s been to in his life.

Or perhaps all the world will look different, now that his eyes belong to someone else, belong to _himself_. Perspective, it’s a funny old thing.

On the other end of the line, Angcroft grinds his teeth.

 _“I’ll need at least a week,”_ he finally grumbles. _“They’ve tightened security thanks to –”_

“I’ll be picking it up in four days,” Arthur interrupts. “Your cooperation is greatly appreciated, Mr Angcroft.”

Angcroft’s retort is baseless and entirely improbable under the circumstances, so Arthur hangs up promptly, just in time to hear Alex roar something even more obscene than Angcroft’s suggestion.

Reluctant to move away from his toasty heater, Arthur stamps hard on the floor three times.

There’s a pause, followed by Alex’s muffled voice shouting back, _“And yours too, Lieutenant!”_

Arthur rolls his eyes and returns to watching the distant poplars lean drunkenly towards the ground.

The window in front of him rattles and gripes, straining to keep the wind at bay.

.

.

In the back of his mind, the next few weeks unfold like a dusty map.

He anticipates the arduous flights, the stamps in his new and improved passport, the clench in his stomach that gets easier to ignore with every pair of eyes that slide past him, uninterested.

He anticipates the night sweats at four in the morning and the rattle of ice in a glass of vodka soda and the taste of one-shot coffee out of paper cups with lids that don’t fit properly.

.

.

He does not anticipate tracking Alex down to a dive in Cape Town; standing in front of his damp ruddy cheeks and his suicidal chatter, in a dusty rum box pantry.

.

.

He does not anticipate Manchester.

.

.

The incident in Manchester doesn’t start in Manchester.

It starts an hour’s drive north, where the Merrimack River has not yet carved itself out of the remnant half of the Pemi. Broad tarmac and bristly conifers; thick white winter still gripping the ground.

Another New Hampshire second-born, another chance for Alex to roll his eyes and make loud comparisons.

There are no comparisons, though, because Alex isn’t here. Not yet, anyway.

Arthur checks into a quaint hotel with a brass knocker on the entrance, then walks down the street to a family run diner that serves two types of soup and home baked bread, where she’s waiting for him.

They sit at a corner table and he orders quickly, carrot and coriander, spelt and rye. The butter tastes freshly churned, melts between his teeth easier than cream.

Pradiksha orders the tomato basil and asks if she can have salt crackers instead of the home loaf.

“You know that’s sickbed food,” he tells her.

The quibbling expression she throws at him from across the table is not a new look for her.

“If I only ever eat it when I’m sick, I’ll never enjoy it,” she retorts.

Condensation drips down her glass of lemonade, a water ring leaking outward into a puddle that dampens her napkin.

“It’s bland,” he says, and she arches her eyebrows high.

“It’s got _basil_ in it,” she says, as if that’s not the blandest herb of them all.

She’s graceless and charming, her spoon tapping loud against the side of her bowl and the crumbs from her crackers end up scattered all the way to Arthur’s lap.

When the waitress sidles past to ask how their food is, her eyes lingering uncomfortably on Arthur despite his best efforts to turn aside, Pradiksha talks at the girl for several gruelling minutes about their blatant use of garlic paste. This seems unfair, as the likelihood that pleated, pinafore _Annie_ in her pocket apron has any say in the kitchen’s misgivings is minimal.

Arthur leaves her to it, watching his chunks of bread soak up the speckled orange soup before scooping them out with his spoon.

“You don’t have enough opinions,” Pradiksha berates him, once she’s sufficiently scared the waitress off.

Belatedly, he realises this was probably her plan all along.

“You have enough for both of us,” Arthur mumbles into his soup.

The diner door opens for the third time in under a minute, letting a blast of cold air rush in with unpleasant force.

“You can’t spend your whole life worrying about the big things,” she continues as if he hadn’t spoken at all; another familiar habit of hers. “What’s the point, if when it boils down to it, you aren’t going to take the time to make sure that when you eat soup, it’s the best bloody soup you’ve ever tasted?”

Arthur looks up at her, trying his best to keep his face close to his bowl, so the rising heat can soften the icicles from his eyelashes.

She’s glaring at him with obstinate expectation, salt on her chin and a speck of tomato soup in the corner of her mouth.

Dropping his spoon, he reaches over and thumbs it away.

“You’re a catastrophe of a human being,” he tells her.

Pradiksha shrugs, licking her lips, and then the salt from one of her crackers.

“Here I thought I was a credit to my Queen and Country,” she replies.

“You don’t have a Queen,” he reminds her.

“Are you sure?” she asks, clinking her spoon around the bowl to scrape the rogue drops down. “Imperialism is a state of mind, you know. I’m practically English.”

She says this last in such a seamlessly prim accent that he might have believed her, were he anyone else.

As it is, he is not anyone else, and he knows perfectly well that she credits her best English to watching a lot of Roger Moore in tuxedos kissing women and doing all kinds of things she wasn’t supposed to be interested in, growing up in a yoyo bounce between Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh.

He hasn’t exactly found proof that she’s lying, or evidence of her connection to the Mumbai HQ of Project Svapnē, but he knows he will eventually. He’s been a bit busy with bigger lies than Pradiksha’s questionable backstory, these days.

And in any case, he quite enjoys the idea she learned an entire new language watching _Moonraker._

“How long do you have?” he asks her rather than refute her claim.

With a dramatic sigh as she sprinkles more cracker crumbs into the last quarter of her bowl, glancing up at a clock somewhere behind Arthur.

“There’s a bus in four hours that I can take,” she says, less than thrilled, only for a devious smirk to ghost across her face. She flutters her terribly long eyelashes, her dark brown eyes a liquid, loving shade of something dirtier than soup and diner napkins. “Whatever shall we do with ourselves?”

Arthur laughs generously; her smile is ruinous, more vivid than anything else in the room.

Dressed hangdog plain in her hooded jacket and jeans, her black locks tied up carelessly away from the severe angles of her face; brown skin unornamented but for a smear of red across her mouth that matches her nails.

Young, though not quite so young as him, as girlish as the delicate finish of her lipstick and the mud caking the edges of her sneakers.

 _Where did you find her?_ Alex asked.

And his response, _She found me, my saving grace._

“Will you send me a postcard from your next stop?” his saving grace asks, sugar cane smile of sweet glee.

“When you get yourself a permanent address,” he tells her for the umpteenth time.

“You can just send it to one of yours,” she huffs. “I’ll find it eventually.”

Arthur tilts his bowl in his hand, finishing up his soup before he replies, watching her hug her icy lemonade with a chill of his own.

“I don’t have one either,” he scoffs, draining his coffee and pushing both cup and bowl to the edge of the table, so he can spread his hands over the surface and tap them against the rhythm of the music crackling an underscore through the room.

“Then you should find one,” Pradiksha sighs, sounding oddly scolding for a nomadic dream thief.

Arthur smiles at her in passive agreement, and it’s chance that drags his eyes up over her shoulder at the right moment.

The diner isn’t busy, but it’s lively, full of movement.

It’s the familiarity of the gesture that does it, he thinks.

A man in a cheap half-suit, his features indistinct for their five-o’clock shadow plainness, reaching across his torso and under his blazer, pulling out an L of hard, powerful metal that sits comfortably in his grip.

Arthur lunges across the table, one hand pushing their bowls aside while the other fists in Pradiksha’s pony tail to wrench her head down. Her face smacks loudly into the table, his own nose buried momentarily into the back of her hair, just as the bullet cracks over their heads, straight into the wall behind him.

The diner explodes with the shrieking chaos of panic.

Staff and customers scatter, their voices transforming in the scrunched-up octaves of their fear, and Arthur’s already on the floor, pulling Pradiksha with him. His hand scrambles for his gun, but Pradiksha’s quicker, and she’s grabbed it off him even before he can find his footing.

“Back!” she bellows, as a second bullet hits somewhere too close to _nearly_ and she promptly fires back twice.

Arthur’s up and away before he can be annoyed she’s taken his weapon, his fingers hooked into her hood to haul her with him, stumbling over a cowering body as he launches through the backswing double doors to the kitchen.

Pradiksha’s shouting, barely audible over the din, and Arthur runs, runs through the bolstering of the kitchen, the fleeing of terrified civilians and out to the back door, to the perishing cold and to the layer of snow suspended between the earth and the gods, all the way into a second man waiting outside to clock him in the face.

He carries the momentum, flips it and twists it and there’s a moment of grappling as they both topple over a bike bar and onto the tarmac in a flurry of fists and knees.

Hope alone tells him it’s Pradiksha’s foot that slams into the side of his attacker’s head before leaping over them both and heading for the cars.

Gravelly ice scrapes and stings over his cheek, he’s yelling and punching and there’s the ricochet bang of another gun, and he doesn’t have time to flinch but he doesn’t feel the bullet hit, so he just rolls into the weight of the man on the slippery ground with him and feels the salt scour of blood weeping into his eye.

“Get the girl!” he hears a man roar, and the ventricles of his heart tear open as the heel of his hand finds purchase on a jaw, before he cracks it with enough force to jar all the way to his elbow.

There’s the squealing of car tyres, it might be five seconds or five minutes, the screaming fills the air like swallows converging on a kestrel and there’s four blasts of a gun before in a blur of blue a car rams into a body with a blood splattering crunch.

His knees knock against the ground, hands grab at his hair and his jacket and he kicks wildly behind him, there’s an open car door and a moment of blind faith as he leaps into the front seat, hasn’t even yanked the door shut behind him before it’s speeding away, a bullet spitting through the back window and lodging in the meat of a seat headrest.

Air cuts through his throat, and he can hear Pradiksha panting as she tosses the gun into his sprawled lap and takes a hard left, her hands shaking on the wheel and her eyes wild as they dart in all directions except for the road ahead.

“I thought you dumped the car,” he wheezes, his attention behind them as sirens shriek in the distance and a car wheels out of the parking lot.

“Now isn’t the time to complain about my laziness, Carnus,” she sneers in returns, and the car jolts up another twenty on the speedometer in a series of heaving squeals.

The adrenaline is surging through him; he can taste it, feel every neuron bouncing ballroom in his skull.

“We need to get out of this car,” he says, his phone in his hand and his stomach in his shoes, and that’s just about all he remembers before a powerful roll of crashing metal overturns them, and the world disappears in a cloud of Pradiksha’s screams.

.

.

When Alex carries him into a hospital in Manchester eight hours later, through the backdoor past an orderly counting his Franklins, Arthur’s fists clench in his shirt and in his hair, and he says, _Don’t let me die please I’m gonna die don’t leave me here Alex don’t let me die I’m gonna die Alex please,_ and it mutes in his brain like a whisper but what he doesn’t know is, he’s screaming, too.

.

.

Two months later, he gets on a plane to London.

“Hello,” Alex says as he stands in the doorway, but he looks more like the elusive and mysterious Eames by then.

“You left,” Arthur replies, and it hurts when _Eames_ laughs.

It’s a handsome, inviting laugh.

.

.

He sends a postcard with Roger Moore on it to a PO Box in Connecticut, and Pradiksha sends one back of Rita Hayworth.

 _I have found a restaurant that makes excellent tomato and lentil soup_ is all she writes, and it would probably read like some sort of obscure code to an outsider, but he knows with all the love he carries for her that she’s actually just keeping him informed of the important things.

She’s good with her priorities. Her choice of ice cream flavour; the polish she colours her nails with.

The big things are her by-products, and Arthur, he needs that.

.

.

When Alex carries him into the hospital in Manchester, he’s losing blood almost as fast as he’s leaking tears, and it’s the first time he’s consciously frightened of dying, in all his twenty-one years.

.

.

**(a hunter’s starry belt)**

.

.

Arthur unlearns himself, bit by bit.

It takes time to forget a lifetime and a half of memories; of people and places and paltry desires unfulfilled by what dreams could conjure.

Grace Rigby asks him: _When did you turn on us?_

As if she doesn’t know when the name Carnus started cropping up.

There’s blood in his mouth, a tear in his lip where he bit through the skin. Rat thin hair clings to his jaw and beneath, lines of red where his blunt fingernails have scratched it.

His wrists are swollen, skin split and treated roughly with water and cream.

It wouldn’t do to lose him to an infection, he supposes.

Arthur knows seven ways to kill himself with nothing more than his own two hands and the few materials at his disposal.

He’s not sure why hasn’t done it yet.

“When did you turn on us?” Grace Rigby asks, as if she does know, as if she has any right to include herself in the collective _us_ of dreamshare.

She’s Interpol. She is not of the _us_ of dreamshare.

She is of the _us_ that trapped Arthur in Slovakia for days without access to his passports; who hunted down his partner until he was wretched with hopelessness; killed his best friend and blamed it on a car bomb; tortured his saving grace into madness and buried her in a shallow grave.

Arthur looks up at her, the cracks widening in his lips and his hands shaking with the adrenaline they’ve shot him up full of, until sleep is little more than wishful thinking.

“When I saw your real face,” he tells her, and it’s the first shred of truth he’s uttered in her presence.

The real face of the dreamshare wasn’t soldiers and chemists, clean faces and scrubbed hands and well pressed uniforms.

The real face of the dreamshare was a boy in Iran, whose thoughts were mined for the trinkets of what he’d witnessed, on his knees with the barrel of Arthur’s gun digging into the back of his head, praying for absolution and mercy that Arthur didn’t have to speak to understand.

“Lieutenant,” the Major said, and Arthur pulled the trigger before the one aimed at his own head could fire.

The boy collapsed, lifeless to the ground, and with him, whatever parts of Arthur’s soul that he had saved from despair.

_When did you turn on us?_

Only, Arthur never saw it that way. He hadn’t turned away from anything, but rather, only towards something else.

“Get some rest, Lieutenant,” the Major said. “You did well today.”

Dutiful Lieutenant that he remained, Arthur had retreated to the confines of his empty barracks, the first to return. The day slipped from him along with his thoughts, and he was awoken from the spell of his spiralling guilt only by the arrival of an unexpected face.

Captain Alexander Garnett, standing in the entry, staring at Arthur with a look that told him everything he ever needed to know.

“I looked everywhere for you,” he said, breathless and so very clearly without meaning to.

His eyes were big and grey, and he was crumpled with exhaustion and Arthur toppled off his bunk in his haste.

“I killed him,” he cried, and he half-expected to be thrown off when he reached out but Alex, he caught him, the taut grip of an anchor, and smoothed his hair down over the back of his head as he wept.

.

.

 _When did you turn on us?_ Grace Rigby asks, when in actual fact, he did no such thing.

 _You turned on me first,_ he doesn’t tell her, because she’ll only want to prove him untrue.

.

.

The first time they take him under, they make the mistake of sending soldiers.

.

.

Officially, they closed down years ago.

Operation Oneiroi, Project DR3AM.

Op Som, Svapnē, Mechta, Unelma. They shut up shop, packed their bags, wiped their slates clean of the blood red finger paintings they marked their ledgers with. Their codes are dead languages in military handbooks, now.

Officially, they don’t exist.

Unofficially, well. Why break the habit of not just one lifetime, but a hundred?

.

.

They’re well trained, that much is clear. Their architect is detailed and clever, their forger is above average.

It’s tricky to teach creativity to people who choose a life in uniforms, though.

.

.

Arthur’s gotten more than used to being teased about his lack of imagination over the years, and most of those criticisms are fair. He still doesn’t like sarcasm, still gets easily thrown by jokes that other people are in on and he is decidedly not. His empathy muscles remain underworked.

What he does not lack, however, is creativity.

There are people who think imagination and creativity are synonymous, and these are the people who never see Arthur coming.

.

.

So, they send soldier into his head. Soldier who are well trained, effective and detailed and above average. There’s nothing creative about their first attempt.

They play it safe, whether because they’ve been ordered to or they simply don’t know any different, it’s hard to tell.

Arthur’s sitting in the chair again. The coarse string they’ve taken to using to tie his hands to the wooden arms has rubbed deep, raw burns into his wrists. He can smell the blood soaked into the thin strips that have dug too far, and he can taste ten layers of ash inside his mouth.

He’s sitting in the chair, and everything is exactly as it has been for what must be going on two months.

He doesn’t count, because counting breeds hope, and hope is what will kill him if he lets it.

Arthur’s sitting in the chair, everything is exactly as it has been, and he knows beyond any shadow of a doubt that the blonde pencil skirt suit sitting in front of him is not Grace Rigby.

He knows it is not Grace Rigby, and he knows that he is dreaming.

Nobody’s tried to extract anything from Arthur in a very long time. Not since his first months with the Cobbs, when he spent dream after dream pretending to learn from them how to build mental defences using techniques that he’d helped design when he was sixteen.

Well, there had been that incident in Ostrava, but that had been so futile he didn’t think it really counted.

Now, Arthur sits in the chair opposite a person wearing Grace Rigby’s face and tracks his thoughts back in a methodical network of ideas, like a rabbit’s warren.

He’s been dreaming for less than five minutes, best he figures.

Even using a basic formula, they’ve been under for far less than half a minute of real time, and Arthur is so angry, so overwhelmingly livid to think he’s been reduced to being thought so _little_ of, that he can’t help it.

Grace Rigby’s face is poised in an entirely believable sneer. The guard behind her is a projection, so forgettable, Arthur can’t quite focus his attention on him.

Arthur laughs, and the sound ricochets like a gunshot.

The dream explodes, obliterated as surely as his patience and his fear.

.

.

They wake up together, which is a mistake, one they can’t afford, because Arthur opens his eyes and it takes nothing to memorise their faces, all five of them.

He knows they’ll try again. Even as the cloth forced over his head blocks his view of them, even as they keep their voices harsh, indistinct, in the hope he won’t recognise them, he knows they’ll try again.

Whatever meagre advantage they held, though. It’s gone. He knows their faces, and he doubts more than one of them is a competent enough forger to _maybe_ fool him.

They’ll try again, and when they do, his fury won’t scorch them. Not this time.

It will be cold, and he will be clever, and if it’s the last thing he does, he’ll personally dropkick every last one of them into the pits of their own subconscious.

.

.

Arthur extracts from him twice.

The first time, it’s under orders he daren’t refuse.

The second, there are no orders, and there’s nothing he daren’t refuse.

He just wants to _know._

.

.

(It’s possible that Alex never quite forgives him.)

.

.

The second time they take him under, they make the mistake of sending the same soldiers.

.

.

**(silt salt, starlit)**

.

.

Arthur figures it out over the course of two years. Or, over the course of eight months. Or, over the course of seven hours.

It all depends on what counts as his entry point.

.

.

“Did you hear about the break in at Six Labs in Tokyo?” Miles Alloy, faithful DC Somna Base gossip, asks. “They think it’s the same person who sold out a black-ops job in Sudan two months ago.”

 _They,_ in this instance, means Miles and his merry band of fellow gossips. Arthur is convinced they have a clubhouse somewhere off base for the sole purpose of meeting to exchange radical theories, overexciting each other like a Victorian secret society.

When he says it, Arthur joins in with the others as they roll their eyes.

He thinks about it afterwards, all the same.

Could one man wreak havoc across continents, protected by the closely guarded secrecy with which each country dedicated to Oneiroi cloaks themselves? How easily could one lonely howling wolf slip through the cracks that their united mistrust leaves defenceless?

The answer, he thinks, is yes.

The answer, he thinks, is yes, with great difficulty.

That’s the first time.

.

.

A year and four months later, Arthur has a break through.

.

.

“If any one of you is caught discussing these dreams, even _referencing_ them, outside these labs, so help me God I won’t rest until you’re doing twenty in Leavenworth. Do you understand me?” Major Wallace roars.

He looks like he means it, too, for all his usual theatrics.

Miles, typically, is the one who dares bring it up in the Mess Hall later.

(“They say it was the same informant as before. Dolos. That’s Greek, isn’t it?”)

Seventy-eight hours later, Alex slides a bottle of beer, slippery with condensation, across a sleek table and says,

“So, Arthur. What did Bravo run into yesterday?”

He’s been off on soldierly Queen-and-Country duties. He’s wearing a white shirt, through which Arthur can see the blunt, bold stains of his tattoos.

And Arthur, he thinks, shy and hungry in the back of his mind,

_Who are you to disregard these rules for one curious Lieutenant?_

There’s an abrasion on Alex’s left hand, speckled nick marks over his knuckles and down to his thumb joint.

Arthur doesn’t ask.

.

.

Seven months later, when Miles Alloy is dead and Arthur is released from medical with a taped up abdominal wall and a shorter large intestine than before, he’s told that Captain Alexander Garnett was shipped back to London in the turnaround.

Arthur is given two weeks of leave, which is unprecedented, the longest free time he’s had since he left home. Silver lining of getting shot out of his Major’s negligence, he supposes.

It’s the first time Arthur practices his vanishing skills.

He goes hunting, and he ends up in the company of an alluring, dangerous young woman who forges brilliantly but rarely does so anymore.

She doesn’t tell him her name and he doesn’t share his own.

That will come later.

What she does tell him, however, is how she learned to forge.

Then she says, flippantly,

“Whoever the ghost calling themselves Dolos is, they must be a forger. How else are they climbing in and out of so many dreams undiscovered?”

And Arthur, he thinks about the way Alex looked at him across the table when he asked so naively, _Are you going to teach us how to forge?_

He thinks about all the ways a man might wreak havoc across continents, all the reasons why he might do it at all. He thinks about what he’d have to endure to take the risk, a lonely wolf howling.

He thinks about the way his fingernails bled as he tried to claw his way out of the restraints they put him in, sixteen year old guinea pig, _G-Two_ screaming into the chasm under the watchful eye of twenty indifferent adults.

He thinks about what this alluring, dangerous woman told him; how they peeled back her identity into shards of inexistence until one day she was an entirely new person. He thinks about Miles Alloy’s shaky grip on is gun, and the heat of Brandon’s voice telling him to lie still, that help was coming, that he wouldn’t die, that he _couldn’t_ die.

And he thinks, _That’s a reason._

.

.

Dolos, the original one, the storyboard lore, he discovers, was a kind of forger; a professional liar whose downfall was his ambition.

(Miles was right, after all.)

Arthur does his reading, until he stumbles upon a seer whose downfall was his cleverness, and he thinks, just maybe, he could accept that kind of fate.

.

.

It’s only a hunch, in the end.

A faith so strong, one that’s borne out of the fragments of loyalty the military could not excavate from the ruins of his heart.

Ingman writes a letter to their former British Captain, persuaded by whiskey and words that it’s the right thing to do.

Arthur sneaks into the envelope a second piece of paper that he can only pray won’t be intercepted.

.

.

_Dolos,_

_They’re sending me to a UN base in Cairo, along with I and O._

_I know what you’re doing. I want to help._

_Yours,_

_Carnus_

.

.

He knows Alex will recognise his handwriting.

If Alex isn’t Dolos, Arthur knows he might well have just signed his own death warrant.

.

.

The woman’s name is Pradiksha.

It means _hope._

.

.

**(more, never, then)**

.

.

In New Hampshire, Arthur gets tailed all the way to Bristol.

Lucky for Arthur, Alex is tailing his tail.

.

.

Alex carries Arthur into a hospital in Manchester and leaves him there with a new passport, health insurance and no way of contacting him, other than to discover his listed next of kin is a man called Emmett Eames.

He doesn’t even know if Pradiksha’s still alive, until one day she walks into his hospital room. She’s furtive, anxious, looking like she hasn’t slept since they crashed their car off the I-93.

.

.

The second time they take him under, they send the same soldiers.

.

.

 _Ton visage est cache_ , a voice murmurs, the final echo lingering like salt in the wet walls of the sea cave.

The phone flies out of his hand, it smashes through the window and a hand reaches down but through the hole in the glass, a bullet cracks in and the man above him topples over in a spray of arterial blood that showers him, hot and copper pot pungent.

Arthur bolts.

There’s the ricochet of yelling, the fourth of July fireworks of twenty guns. He’s out of the door, battling through bodies and stumbling down the concrete steps.

His feet thud faster than the pounding of his heart, splints in his shins as he hurries down flight after flight of stairs. He swings on the chipped banister and leaps over broken scaffolding that’s collapsed into the bulk of the coffin closed building.

Arthur runs faster than he has done in years. The air is mosquito thick, forming cloyed droplets of sweat on his brow.

He stumbles down the final landing, blasting through the broken doorway with a strong shoulder and a glancing pain, out into the burnt ochre sunlight.

He can hear dogs in the distance, and the rumble of cars and the shriek of airplanes.

On the ground, a few metres away, the shattered phone he’d flung away like a rearing asp.

It’s ringing.

He runs to it, darting to and fro to avoid any flying bullets, plucks it from amidst the rubble and continues his zigzag path towards the shelter of another building, a warehouse full of machinery, tractor claws and huge tyres that could roll him flat, looming toothy phantoms in the gloom.

The phone buzzes angrily in his hand, jarring through his aching bones and his breaths come hard in his sternum with every lunging step.

He answers, breathing heavily into it, and the dogs get louder.

There’s nobody on the other end, just his own heavy breathing reflected back at him. He ends the call, pauses just long enough to circle three-sixty, taking in the walls and high shelf platforms, the grimy windows and the aftertaste of gasoline and ozone in the air.

He spots a wide archway on the far wall, it might just lead him down to the basement. And from there?

Well, the sewage system is never flawless in cities like this.

He runs, tears like blood springing from his eyes and mingling with his sweat. His throat is sandy dry and his lungs are bursting, deep bone bruises are swelling under the muscles in his legs.

He reaches the archway and stops, staring into the pitted olive blackness that gropes blindly before him.

It’s an impenetrable darkness, a chasm unnatural and invitingly well secreted.

The dogs are howling into the hurricane of their masters’ confusion, it won’t take them long to follow him inside the warehouse.

In his hand, the phone buzzes.

When he answers, once more, there’s nobody on the other end.

There’s someone he’s expecting, but he can’t quite think who it is.

He ends the call again, and for the first time, chest heaving as he wipes his brow and fists his hair, he really looks at the phone.

It’s broken beyond all repair, the screen entirely missing but for a hooked shard, and the battery is half-gone.

This phone shouldn’t be ringing at all, shouldn’t even be able to turn on.

Behind him, he hears a rumble of a tractor’s engine.

He looks again into the void before him.

The outskirts of the dream.

The _dream._

He’s dreaming.

It comes back, a wicked slam of memory and terror. The convulsing agony of the drugs, Robertson’s sneer, Rigby’s disdain, the bad forgery and the broken toes.

He’s dreaming _again._ Is this the second time? The third? The thirteenth?

Outside, the dogs start to bark and snarl, and there’s the rabid sound of two of them fighting, men’s voices trying to wrench them apart.

Arthur stares at the void, and at the phone in his hand, that will no doubt relate anything he says right back to the men on his tail.

It’s better this time, he’ll give them that. His heart is still thumping triple beats, and he can taste oily blood in the cracks of his lips. He clenches his hand around the phone, the shard of the screen cutting into the groove of his palm.

, Finally, he lifts it back up to his ear and says, in a shaky voice that takes little faking,

“Brandon? I’m waiting. I’m here. Where are you?”

Outside, the dogs snap and the men roar.

The tractor engines are bellyaching, rumbling through the ground, vibrating under his feet. In his mind’s eye, he can see him. Green eyes, tawny hair; that quirk of a grin that promised things he always delivered.

And in the void, swallowing, hungry and whole. Something he has forgotten, just out of reach. A hand in his hair, another in the crook behind his knee.

_I’ll find you._

“Brandon, hurry up,” he says.

The dead don’t mind. It’s in their nature to belong to the living.

On the other end of the phone, the rattle of a crooked, creasing breath, somebody else, somebody who thinks they’ve won first prize, their grubby hands on the pyrite trophy.

Then he drops the phone, lets it crack further into splinters on the ground.

The darkness reaches out with both hands, shadows of inexistence.

He thinks about Mal, her big eyes, her mothering smile, her infinite belief in the dream’s potential.

 _It’s a principle of belief,_ she told him. How many times did she tell him? She was so sure, and perhaps she’d havr managed it, if madness hadn’t found her first. _If only you know it is there, why couldn’t you hide a dream in a dream? Not down, or deeper. Just, a little to the left._

He thinks about her, how readily she plunged into the fantasy of her own cleverness.

“Just a little to the left,” he whispers, so quietly, for only the tractors to hear. He can smell the corn blades stuck in their teeth, and the metallic tang of their cylinders.

The dogs are hurting each other, and their masters are distracted. They know he is close.

He kicks the phone into the labyrinth of the tractor parts, turns his face into the darkness, and leaps into the abyss.

.

.

Arthur wakes up.

.

.

“Can you even comprehend the untold damage you could do to a person’s mind if you pull them out of a dream by the plug, without warning, instead of giving them a kick?” Dom asked him, during their _training_ meetings.

“It can’t be anything good,” Arthur commented, wearing the mask of a curious student.

In another lifetime, were he an honest man, what he might have asked otherwise is:

_Have you ever seen it for yourself?_

.

.

Bile is burning his oesophagus.

He can’t breathe, he can’t move, he’s a tightly wound spring so corded with the burst and recoil of the dream as it shatters his very state of consciousness. He’s throwing up his stomach lining and he can feel each little tear in the tissue of his throat as the blood follows suit.

His nails are gouging his palms, his broken toes are smacking against the concrete and shooting their fissures up towards his ankles.

Someone is yelling, but he can only feel the vibration of it through the air. All he can hear is the scream of his intestines pouring out of his mouth, the white-hot agony of his mind ripped unwittingly from one state to another.

This is not a dream. This is a pain that can only possibly be felt in the real world.

His lungs are shrinking and expanding, his stomach has flipped around inside him, he’s twisted up, he’s wrong, he’s convulsing; he’s Frankenstein’s creature galvanised in reverse, to be jettisoned at point zero. He’s an implosion of incorrect atoms and someone is trying to keep him alive despite the ferocity of his body’s refusal to cooperate, of his mind’s dissonance from its reality.

He can smell his insides and he can taste the grim reaper’s fingertips tucked inside his mouth like a hook inside a fish, tugging him outwards, away, away from where this will ever be felt again.

He wants to cease, he wants to sleep, to return to the dream, he wants to die if it will mean he never has to feel this again.

The sink of a needle in the meat of his neck is barely recognisable, he feels as if his eyeballs have been reduced to the salt of his tears, his mouth to the stumpy roots of his teeth. His bones are swollen and he’s straining hard enough against the restraints to cut deep fissures into his wrists and his knees and his hips.

Paralysis saps him limp as a boned fish, and the yelling stops, and his body stops foundering, only slumps.

He’s still awake.

The pain is still there, the wrenching, ragged agony of every neuron revolting, every nerve ending aflame.

“Thank God,” someone behind him says, while someone else presses two fingers to his wrist to check his pulse, and despite the blinding dent of their touch, he can’t flinch.

“Clean him up,” another voice says, a woman’s, he knows whose, he knows her. “Get him strapped to one of the lab beds. We can’t afford to lose him until we ascertain whether or not he’s still somehow lying to us.”

He’s still awake.

.

.

Arthur lies awake, locked inside himself, for what might be three days.

A demon lies on his chest, unshakeable. He can’t breathe, or see, or speak.

The demon whispers in his ear,

_That wasn’t your memory to take. Why did you do that? How could you do that? I would never hurt you like that. I would never do that to you. That wasn’t your right. That wasn’t for you to see. Why would you ever do a thing like that?_

.

.

A little to the left takes him into the abyss, but he’s ripped out of it too quickly to know where he might have landed.

.

.

Then, they drop him under with sedative to spare, and they probably think it’s going to sink him into submission, that it will help their cause.

It doesn’t.

.

.

**(a lighthouse kinship)**

.

.

Arthur opens his eyes in a cell. He’s been here for hours, or months.

Sometimes, they’re the same thing. Like a dreamer and a torturer, like a whistle-blower and a war-monger.

He stares at the walls, grey, rotting from the damp corners outwards. The door, deadbolts and keyholes. The camera in the corner for him to glower at. The floor, the bed, the chair, the bars over a window that won’t let light in.

He craves sunlight, starves for it, worse than the gnawing in his stomach is the creepy crawl of shadows on his pasty, hollow skin.

One of the deadbolts on the door is on the wrong way. He can slide it from the inside, back and forth. Even without moving he can imagine the rusty shrill of the metal scraping into itself. It will be stiff, at first, until he rams it to and fro enough times and then it will be flimsy.

Slowly, leaving stains on the floor, he clambers to his knees and crawls towards the door.

If he’s wrong, if he’s awake, it won’t matter. Just another reason to laugh at his toddler wobble imbalance, and what’s dignity but another vulnerability to be exploited anyway? Pride is just another muscle to be bruised, no use to him here.

If he’s right, if he’s dreaming, he might make something of this.

_Just a little to the left._

He can feel the slide of his bones in his hands as he presses them tentatively into the cold ground. His knuckles bite into each other, it will be a while before they stop hurting even if he is asleep.

Pain isn’t in the mind, not really. It’s in exposed nerve endings and air pockets inside expanding lungs, it’s in the electric snap down a spinal cord core, bones crunched to dust beneath the muscles strapped to their splinters.

Arthur crawls, beaten dog to the door. He can taste copper in his breath, the acid of his stomach.

His knees protest his weight as he pulls himself up, clutching at the bolts until his fingers find the nub of the slider. He digs his thumb into the loose screw holding it in place.

It takes a long time to peel it free.

His fingernails rip in pieces, bloody tears in his nailbeds and a stinging pain every time he catches the wicks on the metal corners.

The breaths in his lungs trap too deep. As his diaphragm expands, he can feel his ribs straining.

It’s not real, he tells himself. It’s not real.

It will go away, eventually.

He rips at the hard casing, easing it back with the full weight of his skeleton strength, until eventually he hears the cracking of it coming away.

Too late, he realises his error. It loosens, breaks free of its screws, and surprised by the sudden lack of opposition, his body falls back in a hard sprawl on the floor.

A cry jars out of him, a breathless horror of pain, a whimper. He closes his eyes and breathes through it, his hands are damp with blood and sweat that he smears over his face as he clutches at it, giving into the fear for just a moment.

Exorcised, the pain releases him; sinks back into the sea of everything else that’s keeping him suspended.

This is almost certainly a dream. If nothing else, _someone_ would have noticed what he’s up to by now.

He might even be dreaming alone. If they’ve sedated him, if they think he’s _too_ deep to control it…

The surge of opportunity that offers, the brilliancy with which it blooms inside him, is better than any shot of adrenaline might provide.

Arthur pulls himself up again, elbows first, then the heels of his hands, until he can prop himself up against the door. His forehead on the hard frame, he clumsily fumbles with the deadbolt in his hands. It takes a while to position it on the wrong side of the door, directly between two hidden hinges.

Nausea is hovering buoyant just beneath his gut. If this is real life, he’s got a concussion that will likely kill him long before their impatience can. If it’s a dream, they’ve got him so full of drugs this might not even _work._

Ignoring the possible defeatism that lies ahead, he holds the deadbolt in place and begins the painstaking process of screwing the bolt back in, this time on the wrong side of the door.

His fingers are raw, slipping red and open over the case, the edges of the nail biting into his skin. The door beneath isn’t concrete, but it’s not exactly soft either. If it works at all, it will be all the confirmation he needs.

He’s at it for hours.

It’s some time around the third screw snagging half a millimetre before the seal that he realises he’s sobbing, quite uncontrollably. Great shuddering breaths are heaving in and out of him, tears are rolling down his cheeks and his lips are numb for muttering all manner of curse slick prayers. Promises and pleas are leaking out of him, he’s desperate and he’s so, so ready to give in.

The fourth screw turns in, bit by bit.

“Please, please, you’ve got to, please, fuck, you fuck, just get the hell, please,” he whispers to the door, as it gradually swallows up the metal.

When it sits, perfectly parallel to its original fixing, Arthur lets out a loud, harsh yell of victorious exhaustion. His face is pressed against the door, his body is cramping all over and he cries into his hope, as a child cries into a parent’s neck, seeking warmth and safety.

Holding the bolt nib, he slams it in place, as if to lock himself in.

Then he waits.

He closes his eyes and thinks about Mallorie Cobb née Miles.

He thinks about the essay she wrote in French and refused to let a translator touch. How her husband said, _My wife wrote a better one,_ and how that was completely true.

Arthur called her _optimistic_ at the time, her absolute faith in a dreamer’s ability to manipulate what was not theirs alone to touch.

It’s different now.

Maybe he should have felt like that, if he had remained Jeremy Howard all his life. But he’s not, is he?

He’s _Arthur._ He’s _Carnus._

He burned down Project DR3AM like a match to a desert barn, he plucked secrets out of a General’s head like fingers in a candy shop.

If anyone can take Mal’s _little to the left_ and make it something more, why shouldn’t it be him?

Arthur closes his eyes, and he remembers. He remembers until the blood from his tongue is vanished, replaced with the bitty sugar of baklava. Pistachio crunch between his teeth and the cool sweet of mango iced tea.

There was someone there, with him, then. Someone who broke his heart as it had never been broken before, brushed him aside with a few choice words and the uncrossing of a knee.

He reaches out, unbolts the lock, and shoves hard.

The door opens.

Of course it does.

He’s spent sixteen years preparing for this, exactly half his life has been spent shutting half of his skills away to the chemical constraints of somnacin and this is how he will win.

It’s not like this is the first time he’s survived what is not survivable.

The door opens, swings heavy outwards and before him there stretches eternity.

This time, it’s not an abyss.

It’s an apartment.

It’s a cluttered apartment without air con, not enough bedrooms, tiny windows grubby with the hot air thrown back and forth between its occupants.

Arthur gets to his feet, the cracks in his shins screaming, the joints of his knees swollen.

He hobbles out of the cell, into the apartment, slamming the door shut behind him.

He can’t help the bruised stretch of his smile across his face, even as he gips and shivers in the sudden change of climate. It’s sweltering here, he’d forgotten, or at least he thought he had.

Istanbul, in the flowering of May.

He can hear voices, little more the crumble mumble of a conversation he will never banish from his being.

Arthur limps forwards, catching himself on the back of the couch, on the edge of the mantelpiece, the wall and the arm of a chair. He’s sluggish in the heat, yet even as sweat rolls down his temple he can feel the renewed strength in his lungs.

It won’t take long, he’s far enough, he thinks. His mind will overcome what his body above cannot heal so soon.

The very walls are soaked with the smell of jasmine and tobacco. The city breathes in and the curtains flutter, exhales and they whisper with untold wishes.

Arthur stands in the open doorway, beneath the broken arch of the frame.

On the tiny square kitchen table, one leg shorter the rest and a wad of paper to keep it steady, there is a box oozing with sticky treats, and two glasses of deep, fruity iced tea.

He can see himself, or at least, the self-begotten memory of his younger years. He’d thought himself a man, then, but he was still just a boy, wasn’t he?

He can see a captain, with black tattoos and bristly gold hair and incredibly cautious hands.

Eames.

Terror seizes the blood from Arthur’s veins, the wilted sacs of his lungs.

Eames, here, where he shouldn’t be, not because he doesn’t belong in this memory but because he _does._ Arthur, systematically destroying each and every piece of the most important puzzle he ever solved and yet still he’d forgotten how indestructible he is.

Young, foolish Arthur, leaning over to touch his captain’s knee and the captain pulling away.

Arthur hated him then, when he was that foolish boy. He thought he’d never know pain again like the humiliation of Eames turning away from him, brushing off his hesitant affection like it wasn’t the most fragile of gifts, deftly smashing that which hadn’t even fully been offered to him, had only been shown it, in the hope of being accepted.

Arthur watches, now, as Eames pulls back, dismissing the young lieutenant with a hard jaw and a distant eye, and it burns the same as if he were still only twenty years old.

Eames, here, inside his head, coveted sacrilegiously, as if he hasn’t belonged to Arthur for years by now, in his own fickle, pitiless way.

The memory burns and sparks, solidifying around him. Eames looks at him, not the memory, not the boy, but _him,_ Arthur.

Eames looks at him and says,

“Oh, darling,” the way he did not here, but later, that sudden clarity of just how much Arthur meant to him.

“Oh, darling,” he says and Arthur wants to kiss him, but instead he plucks a knife out of the overflowing sink and he rams it straight into Eames’ throat.

Eames barely flinches before the blood spurts out of him, arterial sprays soaks Arthur’s chest and face, ruins the baklava and spoils the tea and Eames’ dead weight slides right off the chair and into a jerking sprawl at Arthur’s feet.

He doesn’t cry.

It’s a near thing.

The boy-Arthur is gone, has slammed the door shut righteously behind him just like he did in real life at the time.

Arthur, alone in flowering Istanbul with Eames’ corpse and the rotten smell of overripe fruit.

He reaches down, threads his fingers through Eames’ hair, strokes the wet shell of his ear, so stupidly vulnerable.

Sweat pours down his spine under his shirt, and his trousers, torn at the knees and hems, are too big.

There will be more, he realises. More memories too resilient to have been broken down by sheer force of will. He’s going to have to look for them, track them like a hunter through the jungle of his mind, eradicate slice by slice that which he clung to in the name of sanity.

Eames once told him, _If I kill you, then it was all for nothing._

At the time, Arthur thought, looking at him, _I could kill you, but I wouldn’t be able to live with it,_ which was probably the same thing.

Now, he looks down at Eames’ corpse and wonders how many times he’s going to have to kill him, down here in the pit of his dreams. The knife bites into him, and when he looks down, he realises he’s holding it by the blade.

He looks up, back through the doorway to the living room, and sees a cell door where the far window should be.

On the other side of it, he can hear raised voices.

There’s cooking oil, paraffin. A box of matches.

Eames’ body burns quicker than the wooden table he’s half slumped under.

By the time they break through the doorway, the entire apartment is up in flames, and Arthur’s skin is a bursting well of charred muscle.

They don’t find Eames, though.

The never find him.

.

.

He stops counting the Eameses he kills, eventually.

.

.

Only one version of him ever fights back.

.

.

**(the rocks, cracked)**

.

.

When Arthur is twenty-seven years old, ten years after Captain Alexander Garnett gives a lecture on mirage theory that sets Jeremy Howard on a path that will end in burning, he does something he thought he’d never do.

Something he thought he was incapable of.

.

.

The heavy, hot smell of the canals lingers through Venice’s streets. The Mediterranean summer is punishingly strong, the dry burn of August prickling over cracked skin like the cobbles underfoot.

Arthur keeps to the quieter side streets, picking his way through the sharp corners and dandy bridges, under the sheltered balconies and over the swampy undertow.

He doesn’t come to Italy often. It’s difficult, being _Arthur_ here, the same as Egypt.

Although, there’s something to be said for the tap of Italian soles on Italian streets.

He finds him exactly where he knew he would, at an outdoor table of a fish restaurant, with a good, half-distant view of the ferries coming in from Murano. He’s a third of a way through a bottle of chilled pinot grigio, an empty plate pushed to one side and a book in his hand.

Arthur stands in his light, casting a tall shadow over his jauntily perched sunglasses, his linen shirt and the oak leather strap of his watch.

Eames turns a page in his book with a leisurely flick of his index finger.

“You already know the ending,” Arthur says impatiently.

Eames’ mouth twitches, the bastard.

“It’s all in the lead up,” he retorts without looking up from his book.

His foot kicks the chair beside him, turning it outwards in an invitation that Arthur accepts only because he’s too warm and he wants some pinot.

From this angle, he has a divine, glistening view of the water. If he didn’t know better, he’d say Eames had chosen the ideal spot to spend a relaxing afternoon on his vacation.

They sit in sweltering silence until Eames finishes his chapter, by which time Arthur has gotten through a full glass and a half of wine, crisp and dry as the bread in the basket staling in the sun. Just as Arthur helps himself to a slice, tearing out the waxy middle and ripping it into crumbs over Eames’ cast aside plate, Eames finally puts his book down flat on the table.

All about them, the pattering feet of tourists are loud, their colours ugly and vivid against the sleek, pastel shades of their perfect backdrop.

Arthur looks at the man beside him, at his golden tan and his scruff, the jut of his mouth, the reflective shine of his black sunglasses. The flecks of burn marks scattered up his forearms, half-healing, some brand new and others almost faded.

“You are not,” he says with some alarm when he finally notices them. “Tell me you’re not stupid enough to do what I think you’re doing.”

Eames picks at a scab on the side of his left wrist with his thumbnail, looking up at him politely and pushing his glasses up onto his head to reveal a pair of tired eyes.

“What would that be, love?”

Arthur can’t help but laugh as he refills the wine glass, taking a sip before pushing it back to Eames.

“What’s the point?” he scoffs, and he doesn’t miss the flinching blink of Eames’ eyelids. “They can’t exactly pay you back.”

“You mean the way Mallorie’s going to pay you back for propping up her husband?” Eames says, churlish and stung.

Arthur looks at the water, fleeting glimpses of it between clouds of tourists. Beside him, Eames is tracing spirals into the book cover.

Arthur reaches up to wipe a line of sweat from his eyebrows, tugs off his suit jacket and starts to roll up his shirt sleeves. Almost immediately, the hard burn of the sun starts biting into him.

He can feel Eames watching him. He glances down at the worn book.

“Do you honestly think that your life would have been any better running around crashing Aston Martins and fucking every pretty thing you find?”

Eames snorts.

“I could do that anyway.”

Arthur looks at him, and is surprised by the downturn of his lips, the heaviness of his eyelids.

He might, just might, have lost weight.

A thorny, ill-concealed part of Arthur can’t help but think, _good,_ can’t help but enjoy a little of Eames’ misery, if that’s what this is.

“It was just a stupid bet, Alex,” he says tartly.

Eames shakes his head, licks his lower lip and crosses his arms over his chest.

“I suppose we just have different priorities, darling.”

It’s getting overworked, that word. Like leather, like dough. It’s toughening and stretching into something unpleasant.

Arthur knows it’s not entirely Eames’ fault.

The truth is, he’s a little scared that one day, it will be meaningless. One day, Eames will be able to fling it at him haphazardly, unthinkingly. That it will be just another string of letters in his vocabulary, another word to say over coffee or in the middle of a gun fight.

When that day comes, Arthur can’t help but think, his heart will probably break.

He knows Eames was torn up by the twins’ deaths, that in his own way this is how he’s coping with his unexamined grief. The problem is, that only makes Arthur angrier. He’s so darn angry at Eames’ hypocrisy.

Why can Eames dedicate weeks, maybe _months_ of his life to a foolhardy long con over thieving some Murano glass in honour of two dead criminals, but Arthur can’t put the same amount of time into helping a grieving widower deal with a catastrophic loss?

That’s the problem with Eames. He doesn’t balance lives as equal in merit.

He might have liked Mal well enough, he might even have some time for Cobb, but they’re not even a blip on his radar compared to Nick and Vivi.

Arthur sighs, very quietly, staring at the familiar back of the copy of _Diamonds Are Forever._

He doesn’t realise he’s leaning into the table, his hands locked together, until Eames reaches over and covers both of them with one of his own. It’s very quick, the warm, tender squeeze of his fingers, the soft pressure of his hold before he lets go.

While it probably wasn’t intended as an apology, Arthur takes it as one.

He picks up the book, using it as a fan just to see the little frown in Eames’ brow as he visibly debates whether or not to tell him to stop.

All those people who think Eames is unpredictable, a wildcard of disorganised intentions. They just haven’t been paying attention.

“That book is almost twice your age,” he says.

Arthur laughs, and Eames joins in despite his disgruntlement, which is more genuine than he’ll ever admit to.

Without stopping the wafting of the book, he reaches across to stroke a finger over one of the newest burns on Eames’ forearm, a wicked looking little comma, the skin shiny and pink.

“You’re insane,” he says, not without feeling.

Eames shrugs, twitching when Arthur presses down, testing the give of the swelling.

“It’s actually quite fun,” he replies, and there’s an open invitation there for Arthur to crack a joke about blowing things other than glass, the way Eames would if the situation were reversed.

He doesn’t stoop to it, so Eames asks,

“How long are you here for?”

It’s difficult to tell, sometimes, if Eames is being transparent, or if Arthur simply knows the cadence of his voice better than anything else. The fragile, throat constriction of hope in his question leaves Arthur feel cut open, raw with the need in Eames’ ever so tired eyes.

“Couple days,” he replies truthfully.

This is the exact moment when Arthur considers dropping his agenda. When he looks across the table, fanning his sweat slick face with the pages of one of the only things Eames’ father ever gave him that he considered to be worth keeping, and he can see how much Eames wants him to stay.

“Good,” Eames says, vanishing back into himself, into his linen and leather, slotting the sunglasses back over the bridge of his nose, as if he realises he’s revealed his hand. “There’s a charming bar just over the canal from my hotel. One big homage to Bellini. An incredibly dubious claim to his origins. Honestly darling, you’ll loathe it.”

Arthur smiles, presses his hand over Eames’ arm in a squeeze similar to the one Eames had given him, and pulls back, taking the glass of wine with him. It’s not quite as cool as it had been, but it’s still fresh and welcome.

“Can’t wait,” he replies, and it’s genuine, the swell of deep, abiding affection that chokes any further comments in his throat.

Except, the doubt has passed, the moment has been smothered by the iron of his conviction.

If he doesn’t do it now, he’ll never dare.

He finishes the wine while Eames orders him some fish, and they argue for the rest of the afternoon with good-natured teasing about the black-market value of fourteenth century glassware.

Twelve hours later, Eames is out for the count, spread-eagle selfish the way he always is in a big bed.

Arthur checks his pulse, counting the steady-thread of his heartbeat. Retreats to his own room two floors below, just long enough to fetch his PASIV.

He doesn’t apologise aloud as he unwinds the IV and pulls out the somnacin from its vial case, because Eames can’t hear him, and if he could, Arthur isn’t deluded enough to think he’d accept it anyway. He knows this is the line in the sand that they never drew, only because they never thought they’d have to.

It’s out of the question, the idea that Eames would ever pull a stunt like this, and that’s his blind spot, at the end of the day.

He could never do this to Arthur, so he assumes, wrongly, that Arthur could never do it to him.

Arthur’s not proud of himself.

Then again, he’s not proud of a lot of things he’s done in his life.

.

.

When Arthur is twenty-seven years old, he does something he thought he was incapable of.

Five years later, he scours his subconscious like corrosive acid, hacking and slicing through every fingerprint Eames has left in his mind over the years, scrubbing away the evidence of him like a single antibody against a virus that has shaped him for almost half his life, until the grey of his eyes is a blank slate where love once resided, and the heat of his body is nothing but cotton.

And the thing is, Arthur never thought he could do that, either.

.

.

**(those bitten boats, sunken)**

.

.


End file.
